Ask HN: Is Engineering Doomed?

[Rugu16]

My question is for Sr. SEs of the industries and veterans. Did you ever feel in your career that your job and field it self will be gone in few years. Looking at history I can see internet era was a big one when lots of people thought all their windows and console programming knowledge is gone, next was apps and iphone when people thought all their knowledge of web programming is gone and now with AI i am seeing reports all the time that machines will make programming obsolete. How can one keep motivation to do anything at this point? How can you compete with creating any product when it can just be replicated by AI in a day?

[uberman]

Think of AI as a tool, like an IDE or scaffold that helps you do your job better (when appropriate).

It is not like we are anywhere close to the point where someone can say "I want a complete solution for X". Hell, I've never worked on a project where someone was actually able to fully articulate what they wanted/needed. I doubt anyone has. The inability to say in plain talk what it is that is needed is at the very core of the critique of waterfall design.

What AI is at the moment is essentially IDE code completion with code block generation. AI is not going to help your CFO create that boutique accounting system they want. You have to know how to program and design to even know what questions to ask of your AI tool. That is not going away anytime soon.

If your solution integrates with boutique APIs and libraries then at the moment coding AIs are a hindrance. They don't tell you when they don't know. They will confidently make some bullshit up. This also requires coding experience to know when AI is bullshitting you. I can tell you from first hand experience that AI code completion and GIS system integration is a waste of time.

[Rugu16 → uberman]

Great points and I do think about AI as tool but the speed at which the changes are coming is stressful to keep up with.

[beardyw]

> lots of people thought all their windows and console programming knowledge is gone, next was apps and iphone when people thought all their knowledge of web programming is gone

Those were gentle transitions. Probably the biggest was from mainframe to PC. I was in a team of designers in the early 90s and found I was the only one who could think in terms of user interaction instead of a basically linear flow. I had worked on getting to grips with it.

[Rugu16 → beardyw]

Right , gradual changes are great and you can look fe to them like from windows to web platforms however AI is changing daily.

[ankurdhama]

FYI, the move from desktop apps to web apps to phone apps to whatever in future will not make your programming knowledge obsolete. Programming at its fundamental level is same as it was earlier - you write instructions to read, process, write data. What changes is the tools/frameworks/languages etc which you should be able to pick and learn as you move to new things.

Overtime the abstraction level of programming has changed, earlier you would write a sort function in assembly, now you just call the standard library. This was bound to happen due to the idea of software/code re-usability. AI for programming, if it kept improving, will be just another abstraction layer in the same way but that doesn't mean anybody who has no idea whatsoever about fundamentals of software engineer and programming can just use AI to create (complex enough) software.

[codingdave]

AI is just a tool. A decent one, but still just a tool. Having the right tool for the job can speed jobs up by 10X, but you cannot get rid of the person wielding that tool. So even if AI does grow up to be more than glorified chatbots, all it changes is the level of abstraction we work in.

[JohnFen]

> Did you ever feel in your career that your job and field it self will be gone in few years

My career is over 30 years long so far, and I've never felt this. AI isn't making me feel it now.

What is true is the exact landscape is in flux -- but that's been true for longer than I've been in the business. All it means is that it remains necessary to do what has always been necessary to do: engage in constant learning and skill expansion.

[sk11001]

If it is, so is most other knowledge work. In which case society is so screwed in the short-to-medium term that there’s no point in worrying about it since you can’t do anything to prevent or avoid it.

It’s like worrying about nuclear war - low probability of a negative outcome completely out of your control.

[Rugu16 → sk11001]

That is a good way to think about it !

[meiraleal]

So when every era ended, the next would was much bigger. This one won't be any different and we will see the need for engineers skyrocket again. The ones that don't update themselves will have difficult staying in the game, for sure.

[shortrounddev2]

I am not afraid of being replaced by AI, at all

[Rugu16 → shortrounddev2]

That means you are ok financially to retire

[shortrounddev2 → Rugu16]

No, my thinking is that if software engineers are replaced by AI, then any job can be replaced by AI and the global economy will catastrophically collapse. I'm not afraid of being replaced because not only can I do nothing about it, but i will be utterly powerless to find any kind of income afterwords also. AI will have destroyed the world without any violence and then we'll all be in the same boat

[JohnFen → Rugu16]

I'm not afraid of it either, but that has nothing to do with how financially secure I am. It has more to do with me not seeing a path to AI replacing engineers in any significant way.