alt Hacker NewsBad engineers continue being bad, good engineers continue being good.
I personally don’t know any colleagues who were good engineers just because they wrote code faster. The best engineers I know were ones who drew on experience and careful consideration and shared critical insights with their team that steered the direction of the system positively.
> Claude, engineer a system for me, but do it good. Thanks!
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> I personally don’t know any colleagues who were good engineers just because they wrote code faster
Same, if anything, the opposite seems to be true, the ones that I'd call "good engineers" were slower, less panicked when production was down and could reason their way (slowly) through pretty much anything thrown at them.
Opposite experience, I've sit next to developers who are trying their fastest to restore production and then making more mistakes to make it even worse, or developers who rush through the first implementation idea they had for a feature, missing to consider so many things and so on.
> Bad engineers continue being bad, good engineers continue being good.
Unfortunately I have seen some really good software engineering peers regress into bad engineers through a increasing reliance on AI.
Conversely some very bad engineers (undeserving of the title) have been producing better outputs than I ever expected possible of them.
> I personally don’t know any colleagues who were good engineers just because they wrote code faster.
However, the best engineers I know are usually among the quickest to open an editor or debugger and use it fluently to try something out. It's precisely that speed that enables a process like "let's try X, hmm, how about Y, no... ok, Z is nice; ok team, here are the tradeoffs...". Then they remember their experience with X, Y, and Z, and use it to shape their thinking going forward.
Meanwhile, other engineers have gotten X to finally mostly work and are invested in shipping it because they just want to be done. In my experience, this is how a lot of coding agents seem to act.
It's not obvious to me how to apply the expert loop to agentic coding. Of course you can ask your agent to try several different things and pick the best, or ask it to recommend architectural improvements that would make a given change easier...
Good engineers need to be allowed to be good. If they are told to pump features or lose their job, they might act like bad engineers as well.
The best paid engineers I know seem to be the super fast hackers who write unfathomable amounts of code in short order.
Unfortunately thoughtful design and engineering doesn't get recognised
>> Bad engineers continue being bad, good engineers continue being good.
I don't know if good engineers can necessarily continue to be good. There is limit to how much careful consideration one can give if everything is on an accelerated timeline. Regardless good or not, there is limit on how much influence you have on setting those timelines. The whole playing field is changing.