alt Hacker NewsAs an engineer, I'm never more excited about this job.
My implementation speed and bug fixing my typed code to be the bottleneck - now I just think about an implementation and it then exist - As long as I thought about the structure/input/output/testability and logic flow correctly and made sure I included all that information, it just works, nicely, with tests.
Unix philosophy works well with LLM too - you can have software that does one thing well and only one thing well, that fit in their context and do not lead to haphazard behavior.
Now my day essentially revolves around delivering/improving on delivering concentrated engineering thinking, which in my opinion is the pure part about engineer profession itself. I like it quite a lot.
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> My implementation speed and bug fixing my typed code to be the bottleneck
I remember those days fondly and often wish I could return to them. These days it's not uncommon to go a couple days without writing a meaningful amount of code. The cost of becoming too senior I suppose.
I'm excited and scared at the same time.
Yes I'm much more productive than before, and I'm convinced we can't get rid of engineers altogether... But how long until my team of 5 gets replaced by a single engineer? Am I going to be the one to keep my job or one of the 4 to be let go?
> As an engineer, I'm never more excited about this job.
How long do you think it'll take for the AI trend to mostly automate the parts of your job that still make you excited?
Everyone thinks it won't be them, it will be others that will be impacted. We all think what we do is somehow unique and cannot be automated away by AI, and that our jobs are safe for the time being.
I mostly agree with you.
Though something I half-miss is using my own software as I build it to get a visceral feel for the abstractions so far. I've found that testability is a good enough proxy for "nice to use" since I think "nice to use" tends to mean that a subsystem is decoupled enough to cover unexpected usage patterns, and that's an incidental side-effect of testability.
One concern I have is that it's getting harder to demonstrate ability.
e.g. Github profiles were a good signal though one that nobody cared about unless the hiring person was an engineer who could evaluate it. But now that signal is even more rubbish. Even readmes and blog posts are becoming worse signals since they don't necessarily showcase your own communication skills anymore nor how you think about problems.