Engineering

The expectations have sped up rapidly. One engineer said that building a feature for the website used to take a few weeks; now it must frequently be done within a few days. He said this is possible only by using A.I. to help automate the coding and by cutting down on meetings with colleagues to solicit feedback and explore alternative ideas.

Lots of ink spilled on the productivity of AI. But one very strong fact remains, if you were copy/pasting from stack overflow before, copy/pasting from LLMs is just more efficient. Besides how many unique apps are built everyday? Execution is the diffrientiator.

Every couple of days a new article pops up about how engineers are X% more productive, and how company Y laid off hundreds of developers because they are not needed anymore. … Also, if you are working on a completely fresh codebase, or on a PoC - the gains can be huge. I was able to build in the last 2 months something that would have taken me a year previously.

IF YOU WANT TO CHANGE THE WORLD, GO INTO BUSINESS

Fun read on the history of computer programming and 40 years. Fun tidbit, businesses change the world, not software.

_{Quote Citation: Charity, “THOUGHTS ON MOTIVATION AND MY 40-YEAR CAREER”, July 9, 2025, https://charity.wtf/2025/07/09/thoughts-on-motivation-and-my-40-year-career/}

I have found that AI-generated code is often sloppy, unnecessarily complex, and a lot of the time, just plain wrong. For me, AI code generation is akin to mindlessly copy-pasting code snippets from Stack Overflow, and we all know how that goes. It usually takes me longer to understand AI generated code than write my own.

You can’t off load understanding. Using AI to generate entire projects isn’t the solution. Using it as a rapid lookup tool, much more promising. Interesting that DORA metrics seem to indicate negative impact on delivery stability. Which if you’re releasing code you don’t understand seems a given.

Engineers got used to those cushy jobs, and became the most spoiled profession out there. We work from a nice office (or your home), solve interesting problems, and get paid in the top 10% of our country to do it.

I once told a friend that SWE is unlike any other field. You don’t have to chase certificates or slog 10 years in the pits. What other career can you say ‘No I don’t know the tech stack and I don’t know the industry and I don’t know the product’ and hear back ‘You’re Hired’?