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AI Didn't Remove the Engineering Work. It Just Made It Easier to Pretend You Did.

Dhruv Jani on September 15, 2026

On September 15, India — along with Sri Lanka and Tanzania — celebrates Engineer's Day, marking the birth anniversary of Sir M. Visvesvaraya. He wa...
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dj29 profile image
Dhruv Jani

Genuine question: when AI writes most of the code, what part of the process still makes you the engineer?

Is it reviewing the output? Debugging it? Understanding the architecture? Knowing when the AI is confidently wrong?

Or is “it works” enough now?

I’m genuinely curious where people draw that line.

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solo dev

I vibe with that. Have some batchmates who wrote founder @ X after their first OSS project and have no users.

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Dhruv Jani

Well, any of that isn't bad! Thing is I've seen now even teenage students deploying single page html files calling html/css/js as their stack and doing that.
Also, I had a friend who wrote something like that on resume. And he got job offer after me, even though having better GPA. 😅

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solo dev

thats it. I think now there should be definition of vibe coding and AI assisted engineering be taught in college too. ha.

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dj29 profile image
Dhruv Jani

Makes sense!😆

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solo_dev profile image
solo dev

Cause sometimes its infuriating. Also, Congrats on winning the DEV challenge. But I'd like to ask how do you use AI in daily life like as a developer.

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Dhruv Jani

Thanks! Also, I'm right now just a final year student. But I'm placed. But I do use AI for hackathon projects and sometimes just to try an IDE. Do you want to ask anything specific?

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Jo Do

A useful dividing line is whether the builder can describe the failure boundary before production describes it for them. What happens on a duplicate request, a partial write, an expired credential, or a rollback after the schema changed? AI can make the happy path remarkably cheap. Engineering is still the work of deciding which failures are acceptable, making the rest visible, and proving recovery actually works.

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Dhruv Jani

That's a great insight. I should've added that😅. These questions are what still define engineer. Have A Great Day!

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Marc Albrecht

Hmm ... I am not sure I get the gist of the article. The way I understand it is that the author has learned that "shaping the output of a program to make it look like the intended result of any kind of processing an input in a desired way" is not the same as developing an actual workflow.
Or, putting it another way, the article to me feels like a first experience of "wait, AI does not understand what it's doing, it's just outputting something that makes me feel like it does".

If a software - or any kind of process - is only built around the "visual" (or any other perceiptive way of considering) output instead of a well-defined process, then it is what today's software (including operating systems) most often is: features without functions.

"Engineering" (see other articles here and elsewhere) is NOT "create a desired output by defining the output only". Engineering includes understanding the process from a to b, if required including a pit-stop at c. No vibe-code, no AI-assisted "make output from input" is "engineering", it is "massaging an unknown pipeline into virtually doing something I feel like it might do the job".

I may be completely wrong though and misunderstand what the article is saying.