{"slug": "being-an-engineer-in-the-ai-era", "title": "Being an engineer in the AI era", "summary": "An engineer argues that while AI accelerates coding, it cannot replace the human judgment, collaboration, and struggle that build true engineering intuition. The author warns against outsourcing architectural decisions and deep problem-solving to AI, emphasizing that speed is not progress and that meaningful software comes from people who care.", "body_md": "I hesitated to write this.\n\nNot because I don’t have an opinion about AI in software engineering, but because it sometimes feels increasingly difficult to have nuanced conversations about it.\n\nI worked in an environment where being “AI native” was part of the identity. And when a technology becomes part of a company’s identity, questioning it can feel almost uncomfortable. The conversation quickly moves from *“where does this create value?”* to *“how do we put AI everywhere?”*\n\nBut I think we need more honest conversations.\n\nAI is powerful. There is no doubt about that.\n\nIt helps me write code faster. It helps me explore unfamiliar areas of a codebase. It can remove repetitive work and accelerate experimentation.\n\nBut there is something important we should not forget:\n\n**Speed is not the same as progress.**\n\nThe truth is, not every problem needs artificial intelligence.\n\nNot every business needs AI. Not every product needs AI features. Not every interaction needs to be optimized or automated.\n\nEspecially in industries built around people.\n\nHospitality, for example, is fundamentally about human connection. The experience someone remembers is often not the automated process behind the scenes, it is the person who cared, noticed, helped, and went the extra mile.\n\nThere is a Greek word I love: **meraki**.\n\nIt means putting a part of yourself into what you do. Doing something with love, creativity, and care.\n\nAnd I think this concept is becoming increasingly important in software engineering.\n\nWhen you genuinely care about your work, you don’t just want to eliminate every inconvenient part of it.\n\nThe difficult parts are where you grow.\n\nReading confusing code. Debugging strange production issues. Getting feedback from teammates. Having discussions about architecture. Making mistakes and learning from them.\n\nThese experiences build engineering intuition.\n\nSoftware engineering has changed dramatically in the last few years. AI-assisted development is becoming part of our daily workflow, and I believe there is a lot of value in it.\n\nBut the reason AI makes me better today is because I learned the fundamentals before it existed.\n\nI learned how systems behave.\n\nI learned how to debug without an answer being generated for me.\n\nI learned how to question solutions instead of blindly accepting them.\n\nI learned through feedback, collaboration, and years of solving problems.\n\nAI amplifies existing knowledge. It does not magically create engineering judgment.\n\nOne of the things I worry about is not AI itself.\n\nIt is the temptation to outsource the parts of engineering that make us engineers.\n\nArchitecture exploration.\n\nTechnical discussions.\n\nUnderstanding trade-offs.\n\nQuestioning assumptions.\n\nDesigning solutions together.\n\nA company is not just a machine that transforms requirements into code.\n\nA company is a collection of people with different experiences, perspectives, and expertise. The best solutions usually appear through conversations, disagreements, and collaboration.\n\nIf we delegate all exploration and architecture decisions to agents, what happens to the collective intelligence of the team?\n\nWhat happens to the engineers who no longer build intuition because they never had to struggle?\n\nWhat happens to the products created by people who never deeply understood the problems they were solving?\n\nWe might become very efficient at producing software nobody feels connected to.\n\nI miss the feeling of building something meaningful.\n\nI miss challenging architecture decisions. I miss deep technical discussions. I miss the excitement of solving hard problems with people who care.\n\nBecause the best software is not created by the fastest person typing the most code.\n\nIt is created by people who understand the problem, care about the users, and bring their experience into every decision.\n\nI love building useful products.\n\nI love seeing customers happy because something we created solved a real problem.\n\nI love software engineering because it is a craft.\n\nAI can help us create faster. It can help us explore more. It can remove friction.\n\nBut we should be careful not to remove the very things that make building software meaningful.\n\nThe future of engineering should not be humans versus AI.\n\nIt should be humans using AI while protecting curiosity, craftsmanship, and ownership.\n\nBecause without those things, we are not building software. We are just generating output.\n\nThank you for reading my messy thoughts, since today i got laid off because my company wants to be AI native, it felt appropriate to share my fears for the future to a bunch of strangers.", "url": "https://wpnews.pro/news/being-an-engineer-in-the-ai-era", "canonical_source": "https://dev.to/ale3oula/being-an-engineer-in-the-ai-era-277p", "published_at": "2026-07-07 20:10:15+00:00", "updated_at": "2026-07-07 20:28:19.554937+00:00", "lang": "en", "topics": ["artificial-intelligence", "developer-tools", "ai-ethics"], "entities": [], "alternates": {"html": "https://wpnews.pro/news/being-an-engineer-in-the-ai-era", "markdown": "https://wpnews.pro/news/being-an-engineer-in-the-ai-era.md", "text": "https://wpnews.pro/news/being-an-engineer-in-the-ai-era.txt", "jsonld": "https://wpnews.pro/news/being-an-engineer-in-the-ai-era.jsonld"}}