[demorro]

These comparisons are tricky, because software in particular has always been a bit weird about what it means by "engineer". The article gestures at this, the majority of the people with the title are not actually engineers at all, although I couldn't prove it, because we don't have a definition.

The best I have is that engineering is the real-world, practical application of the scientific method deployed in service of human values. (The human values bit is important to my mind, as I don't believe experimentation over disconnected, stochastically generated hypothesis counts as science.)

By this definition, vibe-coding does introduce a wrinkle because it becomes more difficult to experimentally verify hypothesis as you have reduced how much you are observing, but it's not a hard impossibility or anything like that.

[telesilla]

My definition of an engineer is someone who has a dedicated education as such. We have the same definition for doctor, lawyer, pilot, teacher - why not software engineer?