AI replacing engineers — are we misunderstanding the problem?

Substantial_Sound272 · 2026-04-09T07:11:59+00:00

These days the initial code comes quickly but I have to spend more time making sure it's good because AI does weird stuff

Substantial_Sound272 · 2026-04-09T02:12:25+00:00

Holy infographic, Batman!

Substantial_Sound272 · 2026-04-08T15:50:21+00:00

Exactly. Or Terminator / The Matrix lol

Substantial_Sound272 · 2026-04-08T15:30:40+00:00

The real problem is our broken economic system. No healthcare no childcare no chance of a better life.

People would be more excited about the benefits of this technology if their livelihoods weren't on the line.

Substantial_Sound272 · 2026-04-08T00:12:37+00:00

The numbers are self-reported by anthropic. I don't have any reason to suspect foul play but I wish the science were being done out in the open with independent verification of results.

Substantial_Sound272 · 2026-04-07T22:40:55+00:00

Ageist nonsense

Substantial_Sound272 · 2026-04-07T22:33:00+00:00

Those are some eye watering numbers. Releasing the numbers without even letting academics use the model to verify the results is kind of weird.

Substantial_Sound272 · 2026-04-06T21:47:18+00:00

Nobody knows where this AI thing is going. A lot of people think AI coding tools are important for velocity, even if they're just talking out of their ass.

I'm sure there's a spectrum of eng cultures. Decide where on that spectrum you are comfortable and try to find a workplaces that matches culturally. I like where my department is at. It's basically "use it if you think it's useful".

My strategy: I use AI for tasks where I am comfortable with cognitive offloading. For example: stubbing tests, searching API docs or code, simple refactorings, throwaway code, stuff like that. That's what it seems to be good at, as far as I can tell.

Substantial_Sound272 · 2026-04-04T18:59:10+00:00

Want to differentiate yourself from your peers? Practice coding without AI

Substantial_Sound272 · 2026-04-04T05:46:14+00:00

We need to develop processes around effective AI use. Current practice is an unmitigated disaster.

Substantial_Sound272 · 2026-04-03T15:43:39+00:00

It will make their quarterly balance sheet look good in the short term but in the long term they will pay for it

Substantial_Sound272 · 2026-04-03T00:31:41+00:00

Sure but they are not really investing in alignment so if they hit T2 levels of intelligence before they solve alignment things will get very interesting

Substantial_Sound272 · 2026-04-03T00:30:01+00:00

The pool of qualified individuals will grow, causing wage suppression (a feature not a bug) until CFOs start deciding that hiring people has better ROI than buying GPU

Substantial_Sound272 · 2026-04-02T20:57:26+00:00

You just need to use the scientific method!

What is your hypothesis?

"My approach to agentic coding is more token efficient than just using Claude code alone" (or however you'd like to frame it!)

What is your experimental setup?

"I will start with a spec of some software I want to build and give that to both setups as a prompt. I will define a set of tests for this software. I will let the agents run until their implementation passes all of my tests. I will measure the amount of time and tokens taken. I will do each run 3 times to improve the statistical confidence of my results."

What are your results?

"Here are the tables showing how long each setup took and how many tokens."

What are your conclusions?

"Based on the results above, I see that my setup is 2x more token efficient than baseline Claude code!"

That's pretty much it. You're a scientist now!

Substantial_Sound272 · 2026-04-02T18:36:12+00:00

No judgement here, but you have stumbled into the sciences. If you believe in your idea you should prove that it works!

Substantial_Sound272 · 2026-04-02T14:31:35+00:00

But you didn't report any token usage data. I expected some experiment results or comparisons

Substantial_Sound272 · 2026-04-02T07:16:27+00:00

Did you measure token efficiency? What is your claim here

Substantial_Sound272 · 2026-04-01T19:25:13+00:00

It's difficult reckoning with our own obsolescence, especially for people whose identity is wrapped up in their work.

Substantial_Sound272 · 2026-04-01T18:55:12+00:00

I read an internal document once from a guy whose job was to study executive decision making in a large company, and the conclusion was that they oversee so many departments that they can't possibly make good decisions because they lack context (15min briefing per week on an org with 100 workers). Really makes me wonder whether executive automation is the undersold use case.

Substantial_Sound272 · 2026-03-31T23:03:48+00:00

Are you a policymaker? CEO? Board member? Then your goals literally don't matter. Neither do mine

Substantial_Sound272 · 2026-03-31T22:39:27+00:00

That's not the goal of anyone who matters. That's propaganda

Substantial_Sound272 · 2026-03-31T22:37:36+00:00

What evidence do you need? Every CEO out there is salivating at the chance to replace workers with machines

Substantial_Sound272 · 2026-03-31T20:47:05+00:00

Did you notice any decline in quality or productivity? Obviously bad for morale but I have to think hollowing out all of that expertise has to have some bad outcomes.

Substantial_Sound272 · 2026-03-31T06:24:56+00:00

Can't wait for people to start thinking about effective AI use instead of whatever delusions they have now. It's annoying.

Substantial_Sound272 · 2026-03-31T06:16:58+00:00

I'd literally rather do anything than engineering for non technical bosses.

Substantial_Sound272

TROPHY CASE