Comment by swyx

hi! author here.

> Just get a feel for how these LLMs respond then build a pretty and user friendly app on top of them.

as you know, "just" is a very loaded word in software engineering. The entire thesis of AI Eng is that this attidude of "just slap a UI on an LLM bro whats so hard" is a rapidly deepening field, with its own stack and specialization (which, yes, some if not much of which is unnecessary, vc funded hypey complexity merchantism, but some of which is also valid), and if you do not take it seriously, others will, and do so running rings around those who have decided to not even try to push this frontier, passively waiting for model progress to solve everything.

i've seen this play out before in underappreciated subfields of engineering that became their own thing, with their own language, standard stack, influencers, debates, controversies, IPOs, whole 9 yards.... frontend eng, mobile eng, SRE, data eng, you name it. you just have to see the level and quality of work that these people are doing that is sufficiently distinct from MLE and product/fullstack webdev to appreciate that it probably deserves its own field of study, and while it will NEVER be as prestigious as AI research, there will be a ton more people employed in these roles than there can be in research and thats a perfectly fine occupation too.

I'm even helping instruct a course about it this week as it happens if you want to see what a practical syllabus for it looks like https://maven.com/noah-hein/ai-engineering-intro