Clumsy Engineers Will Just Become Clumsy People Nobody Wants to Work With
AI has made output faster, yet I think many organizations still haven't turned the time it frees up into results. When things go wrong, it's tempting to blame the AI. But AI is nothing more than a mirror of the person using it.
Only the output got faster
AI is no longer just a programming tool. It has worked its way into almost every stage, from design to operations and maintenance (keeping a system running and fixing it after it's built). Things we used to give up on because of the man-hours (the estimate of how many people and how much time a job takes) are now simply doable.
But many organizations can't keep up with that speed. In the end, people keep working on the same sense of time as before. Output is faster and the whole process is more efficient, yet the logic for calculating man-hours hasn't changed at all.
Where did the freed-up time go?
So what on earth are engineers doing with the time AI has freed up?
Probably nothing productive. They're just leisurely letting AI generate output. And the excuses go like this: "The AI hallucinated (made up something plausible but false)." "The AI's design was flawed." "The code the AI wrote didn't follow the rules."
What the mirror shows is you
AI only multiplies your own ability. If your thinking is slow, the output is slow. If your decisions and judgment are weak, the AI gives you nothing but vague answers.
To get what you actually want out of AI, you need these abilities:
- Experience, and the judgment that comes from it
- The ability to make decisions with the future in mind
- The ability to put things into words
- The ability to evaluate whether the output is right
- The ability to build a verification environment where AI can check whether the output is right
This is no different from having a trusted subordinate. You tell them the purpose, what you've decided, what process you want them to follow, and how to check whether the result is really right, and you hand all of that over along with the material they need to judge. Then you do the final evaluation yourself. Only when you can do all of this can you say you've mastered AI.
No place for clumsy engineers
Unfortunately, a lot of engineers are clumsy. When people who are already clumsy have part of their technical skill taken by AI, there's no place left for them.
Someone who's still green on the technical side can replace an engineer, as long as they can do two things well: give the right instructions and verify the output. And people who can work like that tend to have strong communication skills, so they can also borrow an engineer's knowledge and experience.
Engineers who think of themselves as clumsy were just leaning on their technical skills. What they need to sharpen now is the ability to manage juniors and the ability to manage AI. That's what it takes to really make use of the technical skills they already have.
Engineers who haven't noticed this should cling to their current company. Nobody else is going to hire them.
