| Agree. And with the comments in the thread. I'll caveat my statement, with AI ready repos. Meaning those with good documentation, good comments (ex. avoiding Chestertons fence), comprehensive interface tests, Sentry, CI/CD, etc. Established repos are harder because
a) the marginal cost of something going wrong is much higher
b) there's more dependencies
c) this makes it harder to 'comprehensively' ensure the AI didn't mess anything up I say this in the article > There's no "right answer." The only way to create your best system is to create it yourself by being in the loop. Best is biased by taste and experience. Experiment, iterate, and discover what works for you. Try pushing the boundary. It's like figuring out the minimum amount of sleep you need. You undersleep and oversleep a couple times, but you end up with a good idea. To be clear, I'm not advocating for canonical 'vibe coding'. Just that what it means to be a good engineer has changed again.
1) Being able to quickly create a mental map of code at the speed of changes,
2) debugging and refactoring
3) prompting,
4) and ensuring everything works (verifiability)
are now the most valuable skills. We should also focus more on the derivative than our point in time. |
And not even by much, 1/2/4 have always been signs of good engineers.