[simonw]

Because building on top of LLMs is really tricky. You need to understand things like writing evals, configuring agentic loops, creating and iterating on system prompts, designing tools that work well with LLMs.

It's a speciality, just like being a payments engineer who integrates with systems like Stripe is a speciality.

Being familiar with agent-assisted development helps a little bit because at least you understand prompts, but there's a whole lot more to building software on top of LLMs than that.

Any engineer can get familiar with these things of course, just like any engineer can figure out what it takes to work on payment systems.

[gavinray]

  > It's a speciality, just like being a payments engineer who integrates with systems like Stripe is a speciality.

At $PREV_JOB, we had physical Point-of-Sales systems as well as a mobile app, and provided multi-merchant marketplace functionality with things like disbursement reports and support for multiple bank accounts for vendors.

I had to migrate all of this from Braintree to Stripe. It probably encompasses the most complex payment system I've worked on in my career.

But that's not a job title, it's just part of "make the app work"

[simonw]

At my $PREV_JOB we would have called you a payments engineer for that.

I don't think AI Engineer is an exclusive job title. If anything, coding agents are pushing us all to become generalists much more so than before.