Comment by archagon
8 days ago
Actually, if you defer all your coding decisions to agents, then you're not doing engineering at all. You don't say you're doing "contractor engineering" when you pay some folks to write your app for you. At that point, you are squarely in the management field.
If you're producing a technological artifact and you are ensuring it has certain properties while working within certain constraints, then in my mind you're engineering and it's a question of the degree of rigor. Engineers in the "hard engineering" fields (eg mechanical engineers, civil engineers) a rule don't build the things they design, they spend a lot of time managing/working with contractors.
> If you're producing a technological artifact and you are ensuring it has certain properties while working within certain constraints, then in my mind you're engineering
This covers every level of management in tech companies.
I’m pretty sure engineers in those professions need to know the physical/mathematical properties of their designs inside and out. The contractors are not involved in that and have limited autonomy.
I would not want to drive over a vibe-coded bridge.
The fact that simonw is so eager to drop the word "software" in software engineer and keep the word "engineer" reeks of ego.
You're not the engineer anymore, but you're still responsible for creating software. Why drop the most important word and keep the ego stroking word?
Because in order to distinguish what we are doing from vibe coding we need the word that sounds more impressive.