Currently, there is a lot of speculation about what software engineer actual job is. Of course with modern AI tools like Claude Code, generating text has become cheaper, so typing became less valuable. Part of Software Engineer job is physically typing code to transform an idea into working solution and it is true that conceptually it is the easiest part of the job. However, I believe that physically typing code has more to that than it seems. Imagine you have to solve some not entirely trivial problem. You start by designing a solution on a high level, right? It often times involves researching the topic, learning new stuff. Then you go a bit deeper and at some point after you feel like you have figured out details and feel comfortable with starting the implementation, you go for it. In the process of implementing it, you may discover cases you did not think of, or limitations of the design (because it is either very hard or impossible to plan ahead every single detail). You adapt the design or make a new one depending on how big of an issue it is and then proceed. By the time solution is delivered, again you likely learned something new along the way. You were (ideally) involved into every detail of the solution. You grew as an engineer. What physical typing did is it guaranteed your involvement which resulted in growth. Now if I outsource that to Claude, and just tell it “solve it”, how can I grow as a Software Engineer? That is how I understand most people use it. That often results in a solution you don’t understand, but it “just works”. Don’t get me wrong, LLMs are great and useful and I use it in my job as well. But the extent to which I use them is quite limited. Sure I can prompt LLM on a higher level of granularity, going into every detail explicitly, but then time it saves me by typing instead of me is not that much if any at all IMO. Therefore I don’t think people value that it just produces code faster, they value that it solves stuff instead of them. That brings me to a question whether we need to understand how things work at all? Or just accept it as new normal? Instead of growing technically, grow in prompting? I’ve worked on great projects throughout my professional career and contributed to the core of CPython which made me grow a lot as an engineer, but I can’t help but ask myself whether my skills and knowledge I put so much time in to develop, will be valuable in the future. submitted by /u/Fun_Yogurtcloset_268
Originally posted by u/Fun_Yogurtcloset_268 on r/ArtificialInteligence
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