Let AI Replace Engineers. The Real Job Was Never the Code
I think it's fine for engineers to be replaced by AI. Writing programs isn't the essence of my job, and neither is building systems or running and maintaining them. The essence is solving someone's worries and problems. Recently on X, I came across a harsh criticism: people who write programs with AI will never know "the pride of coming up with a solution yourself." Part of me agrees. Even so, I have AI write all of my code.
"You'll never know the pride of figuring it out yourself"
It started with a post by an X user, @sammycore333. In a post on September 24, they wrote, in essence, that people who rely on AI or vibe coding (giving AI loose, gut-feel instructions and letting it write the code) will never know the pride and satisfaction of working out how to solve a problem themselves. It had 10,460 likes (original post; the language is pretty rough, so I'm only sharing the gist here).
A child drilled on formulas
Watching this debate reminded me of something a mathematician said that I'd seen on X a while back. I don't remember who it was, but the point was that AI solving hard math problems is like drilling formulas and methods into a child: it robs them of the joy of discovering for themselves why things work.
I think that's exactly right.
And something close to that is already happening in math. According to a summary on X, on October 6 OpenAI released 722 math manuscripts written by AI. They covered 372 families of open problems, and 16 of those were problems that Hugo Duminil-Copin, who won the Fields Medal (often called the Nobel Prize of mathematics) in 2022, had been publicly working on. The same summary reported that he was shocked, teared up, and said his research field had been wiped out (X summary).
I'm not the one typing anymore
Yet I stepped away from the keyboard a long time ago.
Presyo Bantay, which I released the other day, is a site that reads price PDFs from the Philippine Department of Agriculture and lets you follow market price trends in your browser. I didn't write a single line of its code. I set the spec, reviewed the work and ran the tests. All of the code was written by a model called Muse in opencode (a tool that has AI write code for you).
So I don't push back on the idea that engineers won't be needed anymore. I don't mind if the profession called "engineer" disappears someday. But that argument only holds if you see engineers as people who just do the hands-on work.
People with ideas, and people with the means
I believe the biggest joy in business comes when you figure out how to solve a problem in society, or the worry or trouble of someone right in front of you. It's exactly the same joy as finding the method in math, or cracking a hard problem.
To me, a program is only the working-out of the proof, not the proof or the solution itself. The people who had the skills to turn a solution into something real just happened to be software engineers.
The people who have ideas and the people who have the means to make them real aren't always the same people. That's exactly why business works.
If AI ends up solving everything, that's fine by me. But acting as if you made something that AI made is just absurd.
People who wrote programs only because the pay was good, or because they happened to have a knack for it, probably weren't that important in business to begin with.
Even if the world no longer needs humans who write programs, and AI can handle everything right down to operations and maintenance, I want to be useful to someone. I want to be the kind of person who can solve people's worries and problems.
I'll keep learning new things to solve new problems, and keep building new things together with AI.
