[withinboredom]

AI can program, but not engineer. Even then, you eventually reach a point in the project where it is too complex for AI to even do snippets; especially if you are pioneering something new that has never been done before.

A sprinter is unlikely to win a marathon, and that is what using AI to program is like. By the time you have to take over, you have a huge learning curve ahead of you as you can lean on the AI less and less.

If you're doing something boring/boiler-plate, yeah, AI is helpful I guess.

[analog31]

Most people with "engineer" titles spend relatively little of their time on actual quantitative engineering or "higher level" thinking. A lot of their work involves manual information processing: Organizing and arranging things, fitting things together, troubleshooting. This could be justified for a couple of reasons: Maybe a lot of the stuff that was "engineering" is now handled by the CAD software. That's great. But also, the efficiency of those tools has raised the complexity of systems to the point where the interaction between parts consumes most of the engineers' attention.

Managers also spend most of their time on the same things, but handling different kinds of information.

But CAD hasn't changed the immutable laws of engineering, such as Brooks's Law. When I hear about the wonders of AI transforming engineers into higher level thinkers, my snarky response is: "Does this mean that projects will finish on time?"

[withinboredom]

If your engineers (software or otherwise) aren’t spending a lot of time engineering, then you’ve got a hiring problem. Most jobs I’ve worked as a software engineer are 90% engineering (soft and hard skills) and only about 10% programming. With AI, it becomes about 60% engineering and 20% babysitting an AI, and 30% programming because the AI got it wrong.

Now, we can’t even hand this stuff off to juniors and teach them things they’ll hopefully remember. Instead, I have to explain to an AI, for the 60th time, that it has hallucination problems.

Personally, I’d rather have the juniors back.

[matwood]

> AI can program, but not engineer.

I feel like that's what the OP said. People can focus on the engineering part and not memorizing syntax or function names.

Too often I see people thinking in very binary terms, and we see it here again. AI does everything or nothing. I just keep thinking it'll be in between and people who are good at leveraging every tool at their disposal will reap the largest benefits.

[scaryclam]

You don't need AI if that's all you're using it for. In fact, IDEs have been doing a fine job at that for years.

It feels right now, that much of the time, AI is a solution looking for a problem to solve.

I find it more useful to treat AI like an easier to search stack overflow. You can ask it to go find you an answer, and then elaborate when it's not the right one.