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Discussion on: Am I a Developer or Just a Prompt Engineer?

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klem42 profile image
Kirill

Ironically, AI made me appreciate actual engineering more.
Generating code is cheap now. Understanding consequences is not.

The people who can reason about architecture, tradeoffs, failure modes, UX friction, operational complexity - those people suddenly became much more important, not less.

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harsh2644 profile image
Harsh

Kirill this is the counterbalance the conversation needed.

Generating code is cheap now. Understanding consequences is not.

That's the whole shift in two sentences. The commodity dropped in price. The rare skill didn't. AI didn't make engineering less valuable it made thinking more valuable, because thinking is now the only thing the AI can't do for you.

The people who can reason about architecture, tradeoffs, failure modes those people became more important, not less.

This is the hopeful version of the article I could have written. Not what did we lose but what's now worth more. The floor dropped. The ceiling lifted.

I wrote about the identity crisis. You wrote about the opportunity. Both are true. Both need to be said.

Thank you for this genuinely. 🙌