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by onlyrealcuzzo 4 days ago
> With LLMs, only the "best" engineers will survive, because nobody needs mediocre engineers anymore.

LLMs are going to show that there's a huge divide in "engineers" between people who love "coding" and people who like "engineering".

The group of people kicking and screaming the most are the people who love code and don't want to see their coding go away.

These are typically the build vs buy folks. "We can't use anything anyone else wrote, I can do it better..."

What do you think Staff level engineers do? They don't sit around coding all day.

Writing the code is just something you had to do in the past to get the job done.

What you get paid to do is "engineer". The two are related, but they are separate. Coding is a very small part of the average engineer's job (and almost none at staff level and above).

And yet the vast majority of engineers think that the world is going to end if they aren't spending most of their time "coding".

2 comments

I disagree with most of this. I'm kicking and screaming pretty hard, and yet I'm not one of the "I can do it better" folks. My whole career has been in open source. I'm all about choosing the right tool. I'm also tech lead on a team of seven, so I'm not writing a lot of code anyway. What I am doing all day is sending AI-generated code back to be rewritten, rethought, re-architected. I'm starting to think we would get more done if nobody on my team used Copilot.
Why is everyone acting like this is unknowable? Can’t you just look and see what the team’s output was like 2-3 years ago? Of course there might be long term risks that have a time lag and are thus not visible yet, but it shouldn’t be a complete mystery
Would you explain this - " I'm starting to think we would get more done if nobody on my team used Copilot." ?

Interesting to see if you why you see it destructive. I can certainly see that a lot of the times, copiloted solutions are working but less than ideal

> What I am doing all day is sending AI-generated code back to be rewritten, rethought, re-architected. I'm starting to think we would get more done if nobody on my team used Copilot.

Sounds like a "your team" problem, and not a tool problem...

I hate to break it to you...

If your team can write crap in Ruby, they can write crap in Rust, too.

And if they can write crap with AI, they can write crap without it, too.

Very well said and if you look at some of the other threads on hacker news about why people don’t like AI it specifically because they like typing and coding

The majority of my time is an engineering manager has been teaching “engineers” how to actually do engineering with any kind of rigor

The number of engineers who have an absolutely no theoretical structural or system basis for what they’re doing is the vast vast majority