Let them attempt to use ai to build business critical systems and when they waste tens amd hundreds of millions they can rehire master builders who know what they're doing
They will attempt and then soon enough they will be succeeding, and the master builders will have all retired, and that's the point that humans become dependent upon AI's. I aim to live a couple more decades and I sadly expect to see it play out this way.
Master builders ought to write blogs, books and speak at conferences and in podcasts for clout and subscriber money so the training data can get scooped up in the next loop. And pick the best of the best for master/apprentice training while you still can
Being a really good engineer - the kind of engineer you can assign a feature to and they promptly turn around a robust, maintainable, secure and well documented implementation.
I'll be explicit: Claude is just another tool in your SW engineer's belt.
If you believe Claude makes you a good engineer and you previously weren't, I am saying that's not true and you still are not a good engineer even with the latest-and-greatest Claude model.
The difference is between "helps" (in your comment) or "you are". Sure, it helps a good engineer do more, do better, etc — but the thread was on being a good engineer.
I was a "good" (whatever that means !) SW engineer long before Claudex. At least good enough that both users and bosses had nothing but praises. And I always took my job and the needs of the users seriously.
It's "just another tool", sure. But one that is so powerful that some things that used to take a day now take minutes, or ones that used to take a week now take a day. And I get even more praises now, along with more time to focus on understanding the needs and controlling quality. For me it's not really about stuffing as much features as possible, but providing better software.
I'm glad this happened after 25 years in my career. I believe I'm in a privileged position where I can benefit from LLMs and still have the knowledge to effectively correct the machine or go back to "manual mode" if anything goes wrong.