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AI demands more engineering discipline. Not less

charitydotwtf.substack.com

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Re: AI demands more engineering discipline. Not less

#5

Post by argee »

workbox wrote: post #3

I did not enjoy reading this article. The writing was fine, and each individual paragraph was fine, but the whole thing together was meandering and dare I say pointless. It was so many words and yet so little seems to have been said.

I'm not sure this article had enough thought put into it. For example:

    What happened in 2025 was this: the economics of code production were turned upside down. Instead of being very hard, time-consuming, and expensive to generate code, it became effectively free and instant. Lines of code went from being treasured, reused, cared for and carefully curated, to being disposable and regenerable, practically overnight.
It's not so much as "the economics [...] were turned upside down", but that a manufacturing process that used to be strictly additive (akin to 3D printing) is now complemented by a subtractive process (akin to CNC milling). The "shape" that is demanded hasn't really changed, and nor has the human effort (as long as you care about achieving certain tolerances). You still have to "treasure, reuse, care for, and curate" your product to whatever degree the market demands.

Also I disagree with:

    Lines of code are not the ideal artifact to review
What does "ideal" mean here? When I was growing up "show your work" was the rule for all examinations. Why? Because we're working to improve mental models and thought processes for the next generation, not just products we will release tomorrow.

Re: AI demands more engineering discipline. Not less

#6

Post by AndrewKemendo »

Broadly concur with this and in fact it’s all of this is going to make doing real engineering easier in my opinion

The author makes the wrong assumption though that the majority of people who are doing engineering want to do even more engineering.

It’s my experience that most technology workers just want a high paycheck and have some kind of association with being in tech and doing cool things

Re: AI demands more engineering discipline. Not less

#7

Post by e12e »

Great article. I'm not sure the author is correct - but I think something is happening to the adage:

> A sufficiently detailed specification is runnable code.

In a way I think LLMs will enable the dream of 4gl and "sufficiently smart compilers"[c].

LLMs aren't smart, but they are capable. Especially capable of translation and transformation.

I can certainly see them help move the abstraction horizon at which we work - so that rigid high level descriptions of the desired logic/process along with the process for quality testing - become the relevant curated artifacts - and the generated go/rust/java/python/etc code become incidental and mutable; subject to constant rewriting as part of the deployment of systems.

[c] You know, the ones that take naive C/C++ and produce executables that fully leverage RISC/EPIC platforms to be better than CISC. See also: Intel Itanium

Re: AI demands more engineering discipline. Not less

#8

Post by esafak »

glouwbug wrote: post #4

Before 2023 I remember everyone here on HN championed that removing lines of code was the strongest senior metric

Simplification is still good. I remember one senior that only removed code when he joined the company I was at until he became a manager!
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