[simianwords]

The post is right superficially. It made being an engineer harder because it took away the easy parts that anyone can do and it forces engineers to think of the hard ones.

No jobs get easier with automation - they always move a step up in abstraction level.

An accountant who was super proficient in adding numbers no longer can rely on those skills once calculator was invented.

[jghn]

> it took away the easy parts

This is the key. I haven't found that things have become harder. The hard parts are still hard, and those have been the most important and prominent parts of my job once I reached a certain level.

[RevEng]

Exactly. I'm a principal software engineer. My job is a lot less about writing code and a lot more about planning, designing, reviewing, and training.

However, I do wonder how we will train juniors to become seniors. Perhaps the answer is that the curriculum changes from coding and data structures to architecture and design which was typically a last minute addition in college.

[RevEng]

I disagree on making it easier. I'm very capable of writing code in multiple languages but it's boring and monotonous. It's getting in the way of me building the system I have in mind. I prefer the engineering (design) to writing. If I can describe my system design to something (a junior developer or an AI) and see it come to life quickly, that's great; it lets me spend more time on designing the system, or perhaps designing more systems.

That said, there are plenty of amateurs who find coding to be approachable and system design to me daunting. For them, eliminating coding and moving the focus to system design would be a nightmare.

[lelanthran]

> The post is right superficially. It made being an engineer harder because it took away the easy parts that anyone can do and it forces engineers to think of the hard ones.

I dunno about that. Look at blogging as an example - AI took away the "easy"[1] part of blogging, and now we are left with 90% crap AI-generated "articles" like the one you just read.

I feel it's the other way around - AI took away the hard parts, of both blogging and programming, and now what have to look forward to every single damn day is a deluge of AI slop of absolutely poor quality.

Continuing with the literature analogy (because this article was written by an AI), adding AI as a tool for authors isn't producing the next Terry Pratchett quicker, it's delaying the production of the next Terry Pratchett because the next Terry Pratchett will be drowned out by an unstoppable volume of AI slop.

After all, if you can't recognise obvious AI blog posts, what makes you think you can recognise poor code?

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[1] I am using the term as you are using it. I don't really believe that it took away the easy part.

[383toast]

The post is 100% AI generated according to Pangram

[mads_quist]

Yes