We might all be AI engineers now
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We might all be AI engineers now
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Re: We might all be AI engineers now
#2[flagged]
Re: We might all be AI engineers now
#3Not a day goes by that a fellow engineer doesn't text me a screenshot of something stupid an AI did in their codebase. But no one ever mentions the hundreds of times it quietly wrote code that is better than most engineers can write.
The catch about the "guided" piece is that it requires an already-good engineer. I work with engineers around the world and the skill level varies a lot - AI has not been able to bridge the gap. I am generalizing, but I can see how AI can 10x the work of the typical engineer working in Startups in California. Even your comment about curiosity highlights this. It's the beginning of an even more K-shaped engineering workforce.
Even people who were previously not great engineers, if they are curious and always enjoyed the learning part - they are now supercharged to learn new ways of building, and they are able to try it out, learn from their mistakes at an accelerated pace.
Unfortunately, this group, the curious ones, IMHO is a minority.
Re: We might all be AI engineers now
#4> The problem is: you can’t justify this throughput to someone who doesn’t understand real software engineering. They see the output and think “well the AI did it.” No. The AI executed it. I designed it. I knew what to ask for, how to decompose the problem, what patterns to use, when the model was going off track, and how to correct it. That’s not prompting. That’s engineering.
That’s the “money quote,” for me. Often, I’m the one that causes the problem, because of errors in prompting. Sometimes, the AI catches it, sometimes, it goes into the ditch, and I need to call for a tow.
The big deal, is that I can considerably “up my game,” and get a lot done, alone. The velocity is kind of jaw-dropping.
I’m not [yet] at the level of the author, and tend to follow a more “synchronous” path, but I’m seeing similar results (and enjoying myself).
Re: We might all be AI engineers now
#5> Building systems that supervise AI agents, training models, wiring up pipelines where the AI does the heavy lifting and I do the thinking. Honestly? I’m having more fun than ever.
I'm sure some people are having fun that way.
But I'm also sure some people don't like to play with systems that produce fuzzy outputs and break in unexpected moments, even though overall they are a net win. It's almost as if you're dealing with humans. Some people just prefer to sit in a room and think, and they now feel this is taken away from them.
Re: We might all be AI engineers now
#6This essay somehow sounds worse than AI slop, like ChatGPT did a line of coke before writing this out.
I use AI everyday for coding. But if someone so obviously puts this little effort into their work that they put out into the world, I don’t think I trust them to do it properly when they’re writing code.
Re: We might all be AI engineers now
#7> Building systems that supervise AI agents, training models, wiring up pipelines where the AI does the heavy lifting and I do the thinking. Honestly? I’m having more fun than ever. I'm sure some people are having fun that way. But I'm also sure some people don't like to play with systems that produce fuzzy outputs and break in unexpected moments, even though overall they are a net win. It's almost as if you're deali…
I'm just an old school programmer who loves writing code, and the recent AI developments have just taken the most fun part away from me.
Re: We might all be AI engineers now
#8[dead]
Re: We might all be AI engineers now
#9Not a day goes by that a fellow engineer doesn't text me a screenshot of something stupid an AI did in their codebase. But no one ever mentions the hundreds of times it quietly wrote code that is better than most engineers can write. The catch about the "guided" piece is that it requires an already-good engineer. I work with engineers around the world and the skill level varies a lot - AI has not been able to bridge…
Quite frankly, if AI can write better code than most of your engineers "hundreds of times", then your hiring team is doing something terribly wrong.
Re: We might all be AI engineers now
#10Not a day goes by that a fellow engineer doesn't text me a screenshot of something stupid an AI did in their codebase. But no one ever mentions the hundreds of times it quietly wrote code that is better than most engineers can write. The catch about the "guided" piece is that it requires an already-good engineer. I work with engineers around the world and the skill level varies a lot - AI has not been able to bridge…
I agree on the curiosity part, I have a non CS background but I have learned to program just out of curiosity. This led me to build production applications which companies actually use and this is before the AI era.
Now, with AI I feel like I have an assistant engineer with me who can help me build exciting things.