this post was submitted on 27 Jun 2026
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In my experience, AI is an amplifier.
Good engineers will produce more good code, because they ask the right questions, know what good looks like and check the output.
Bad engineers will produce reams more bad code. The mistakes they make will be amplified. They will give wrong and incomplete instructions, won't see what the problems are with the result and will ship it anyway.
This amplification also means people will spend a larger proportion of time reviewing than coding, which I think is less interesting.
All of this is stuff that can, to some extent, be addressed with policy. You help and instruct juniors, encourage people to better understand and own their code, or at worst reprimand them if they don't.
You can adjust expectations of product managers and explain to them that more is not better, as it always has been. Faster development can often come with bugs and tech debt and this is more of the same.
All I've said above is puts aside the ethical arguments of using or not using AI of course. That's a separate can of worms entirely.
Nah, good engineers are retiring, bad engineers are running rampant. You give yourself away calling us engineers, we were never, except for some yearly title increase instead of money. Just programmers, and that is fine. Engineer is a whole other thing from the steam age, my BSc was in Math, worked fine to get me in.
There are different ways to go about "programming" - if you're "just a programmer" that's fine, you're essentially doing window dressing for a department store, the world needs a lot of you. There are engineering aspects to software too, and if you let "just a programmer"s handle all of that, you will find out what they are lacking as soon as the engineering gets tested in use.