| > An engineer can delegate -- period. Yes and no. Engineering does involve delegation but what defines an engineer is is what work they do, not what work they pass onto others. If it helps you understand this, consider the role of an engineer as someone that makes engineering decisions. If you give a specification to a colleague and ask them to write code for you, then you're delegating those engineering decisions. When you write high level code, yes you allow a compiler or interpreter to determine how to turn your instructions into machine code, but you have made engineering decisions in order to design the end result. If you give instructions via product specifications, then you have acted as a project manager or business analyst, not as an engineer. To use another analogy, imagine you are a chef and you go to eat at a restaurant you don't work in. When you order from the menu, you are not a chef at that moment, even if your background suggests you are capable of being one. Similarly, ordering code from an AI agent does not give you the right to call yourself an engineer when doing so, as you did very little of the real engineering work to produce the end result. > If all you do is write code you're not an engineer. Engineering requires thought and application of thought, and if you're outsourcing both then you don't qualify as an engineer. > The engineer who spends 90% of his time architecting systems and testing them at a high level is making safer and more stable software than the codemonkey who spends 90% of his time tinkering with the details. The devil is in the details. A technical architect that doesn't understand the tradeoffs in the designs they're specifying isn't worth the money they earn. > Who said anything about "saving time"? Almost everyone that is selling the benefits of AI. Clearly you haven't been paying attention to industry trends. |