Comment by jama211

See this is where I think I fundamentally disagree. It’s more like being a scientist who takes 10 rats and tries to train them to sniff out TB, and once they find one that can do it reliably, they go and do real work with it. Just because the rat is the one doing the sniffing doesn’t mean the scientists aren’t real scientists. And just because we work with a tool that isn’t perfectly reliable doesn’t make us any less engineers as long as we manage and take ownership of the output as we alter and massage it from the machine. Imagine back in the day calling devs that didn’t write in assembly “alchemists” because they didn’t fully understand how a compiler works and just trusted it instead. As long as they’re reading the code, testing the logic, and working towards an outcome they take ownership of, they’re engineers, and so are people who use LLM’s. It’s dangerously close to elitism gatekeeping to say otherwise.

Also I’ve been a software engineer for 15 years so I think I don’t “have no hope of becoming a software engineer”, no personal attacks please.