That usually requires a 3 to 5 year degree, and possibly professional exam.
Having the AI do the work doesn't make one an engineer.
Just like one doesn't become a writer by owning a typewriter or a word processor.
Isn’t this what society already largely rewards? See the personality cults around CEOs and not even founders.
No? Then you are not qualified to say that other people are not qualified!
Do you see the absurdity of your position now?
I wouldn’t say it’s lacking value. Maybe digital plastic is the perfect metaphor. Plastic is disposable and probably bad for the environment. But useful for all sorts of weird little tasks. Plastic is everywhere despite its weaknesses because sometimes you just want a thing shaped like this.
I’ve got a little personal data archive going back 20 years. But unfortunately it’s suffering bit rot. Last night I discovered the main hard drive storing it is suffering read failures - the zfs checksums aren’t matching. I pulled out Claude and told it to make a program that could make, maintain and verify a sidecar database of file hashes and reed-Solomon parity data so I can fix some small percent of bit rot that the drive experiences. A 10% increase in file size is worth it for the peace of mind of knowing that footage of my late grandma will still exist when I’m her age. (I have backups, but the backups might also suffer bit rot and I might not even know).
Claude’s program isn’t art. I’m not putting it on my resume. If I had infinite time I’d love to make something like this lovingly by hand. But I’m busy. And Claude can make something in an hour or two which solves my problem. Nice.
Is it slop? Yes. Is it useful? Absolutely.
More software than you'd think can get people killed, though.
And more software than you'd think is running inside a barely-understood SCADA package that runs user scripts, which can now be authored by AI the user doesn't understand, and that can result in either or both of the above outcomes. This is true in just about every city in the world, several times over.
A better analogy is, now you have what seems like an increasingly intelligent personal assistant that can do any cognitive work that you ask it to do, to increasingly better result, has retrograde amnesia, no accountability, entirely middle of the road morality, access to the internet... eh this isn't really a good analogy either.
More people have the capability now, but not necessarily the experience or understanding.
Point is, if I give a person a calculator, it doesn't even make them the tiniest bit of a mathematician. Nor if I give them a pencil, either. The tool never, ever makes the tradesperson.
Whatever's happening with LLMs, it's not making people programmers. It's how you use the tool, which validates that.
It’s weird though, LLMs still don’t seem very good at magically enabling most non developers able to make software. I’ve tried with a couple people - mostly for curiosity’s sake. Even when they have pressing needs that software could solve, they’re really resistant to talking to the machine about them. Then they don’t know what to actually ask the ai to do. Regular people don’t seem to know what use cases are. Or what a design mockup is. They don’t know what a website is, or what the limitations are. The llm could help guide them through all of this, but the people I’ve sat down in front of the machine didn’t ask the machine to guide them through the process at all.
Of course, if you only know how to vibe code, that doesn’t make you an engineer. But I’m no longer convinced that LLMs make developers pointless. If anything, so far they seem to make our skills much more valuable. With LLMs, I can get a lot of low quality work done quickly if that’s what the project calls for.
AI doesn't make you an expert. Or even a professional in any field. First, AI is terrible at cogent work, without someone driving it. And even if you do get it to do all the work, then that's not you doing it.
"Hi, I asked a coder friend to write an app, I'm a developer", nope!
(I mean, I guess as soon as you start whacking things together with a hammer, you technically sort of are being a carpenter, but that's not the point.)
I think whacking things together with a hammer is the act of building (however inexpertly) whereas carpenter (and other titles) convey something about expertise, mindset, or the intent to hone skills. The DIYer might or might not qualify as an amateur carpenter/electrician/plumber/whatever.
They actually do all of that
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
I think it's pretty obvious what parent poster was implying. Pedantic nitpicks add nothing to the discussion.
edit: sigh, fucking rate limits are such a dumb mechanic if you want quality long-form discussion. By the time I can reply nobody will be looking at their replies.
anyways LLMs might displace "programmers" in the way that 3D CAD software replaced draftsmen, but software engineering, the actual design and architecture skill, isn't going anywhere. I can use carpentry tools to build a bridge over a creek but I'm not qualified to build a bridge carrying Interstate traffic.
These tool analogies are self-soothing for programmers who see agents is simple tools of their trade. But the point of articles like this is that AI agents are more like spreadsheets --- only more so. They're devices that allow normal people without training or aptitude to do things with computers that only programmers were doing before. They displace programmers.
In that sense, the closest physical analogy to a coding agent is probably a 3D printer. But: a really good 3D printer, into which hundreds of billions of dollars had been invested entirely for the purpose of making the printer work weirdly well even for people who have no interest in the different kidns of filament spools.
The claim I responded to was nothing but weak elitist gatekeeping. Such people should think really hard why they are how they are. It's ob obnoxious.
They're all self-regulating professions with licensing bodies and professional standards?
Here in the US; the head of HHS and DOD decided that flu vaccines were no longer mandatory; until the flu exploded on military bases. I am not taking a position here because I genuinely do not know what the answer to this is but I do think it is as important as it is interesting.
I many ways I think AI amplifies the "The Dunning-Kruger" by an order of magnitude; I think this could be one of the defining issue of our time.
If I choose to hire someone for a job, I really don't care how they got there. Be it self taught or through school or university.
Drawing a line always means you take away opportunity, which isn't yours to take.
I sure do.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22034221
I was very anti it then - it was clearly Consultancy BS; but now non-devs really do have much more scope to create things that were only possible by software engineers before - and yes that creates challenges for us professionals.
But I no longer sneer at "The Citizen Developer" as an idea; its time has come.
Your comment fits a pattern I see on HN all the time from the older crowd that was promoted to management way too early in their career. It's not helping.
The level of propaganda reaches Maoist proportions.
But as I've used it, I've noticed that it overcomplicates everything and often even forgets what it previously said, and makes decisions that contradict it.
The AIs need a firm guiding hand, like a lead developer would give junior and mid-level programmers, and even occasionally to a senior developer that went off the rails for personal obsessions.
For instance, I was just trying to have it make a simple shopping list app. I had Claude take my old shopping info from the Google Keep list we use (it keeps the old checked-off items) and get the latest grocery ad, and produce a list of suggestions. It was amazing! I decided I want to send that info to a server, have a checklist there, and then keep the info for later so the AI could do it again.
After a lot of questioning (via Matt Pocock's skills, which are great) it was so complicated I finally yelled at it for overcomplicating everything, and told it how simple I wanted it to be, again.
It kept insisting on IDs for products, IDs for stores, IDs for store sections... Even after I told it no IDs. I finally said it a few more times in different ways.
It's finally getting back to the simple webapp that I imagined. It needed a lot of handholding to get it there.
And it's the kind of thing I would see from devs that were inflexible and had to see things a certain way.
I'm not ruling out that it could eventually get over this phase, but I have a feeling it'll always be something that needs handling.
My other project right now was naturally complex, and needed a lot of that stuff, and things have been going better, but I still correct it rather a lot, even on things I'd previously told it.
Some arguments about shadow development and IT are valid, like security and who takes ownership after the original developers leave, but they don't really account for the reality that organizations expand constantly, business needs are perpetually exploding and most development shops are so mired in business requirements and bureaucracy that there's genuinely no value involved with interacting with them.
> business needs are perpetually exploding
Ignorance is perpetually overthinking. If you want to be an engineer, you should quit your current role and reapply instead of ranting on here.
Engineering to these folks is a one-and-done endeavour. You just prompt and fire it off and ride off into the sunset, leaving the mess for someone else to clean up. They never see the work that goes on after the launch party. The midnight debugging sessions, the database migrations, the DNS failures, debates over which auth provider to use, the list goes on. Until the "citizen developer" is willing to engage in the less "sexy" part of software engineering, the world will move on without them as well.
Visual Basic
Low-Code
Power Platform
Although AI substantially changes the situation the hard part of being an engineer was never the code.
A technician is defined by the tools they work with, an engineer is defined by the problems they can solve. Taking a dozen different business processes and stakeholders and figuring out how to actually solve the problems they have is engineering.
There's lots of caveats asterisks & limitations, sure sure sure: we hear you Technically Correct repliers, here to spread your Well Actually naysayings.
But at the end of the day: heck yes. So much heck yes. Even if you are not engineering well, just the ability to have your agent go in and do reconissance of systems. "Reverse engineer this Bluetooth protocol for my device" or what I'm doing now, "reverse engineer my epaper display controller"... People have an incredibly powerful tool for assessing the world, for finding out.
And I for one strongly believe that will beget the great virous circle of lovely lovely fucking around. A wheel that is humanity's best invention, best motivation, best traction, best side, and one that any self proclaimed Hacker if any spirit ought be out of their seats cheering raving with excitement happy for.