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Comment by btucker | Hacker News Reader

I've been starting to think of it like this:

Great Engineer + AI = Great Engineer++ (Where a great engineer isn't just someone who is a great coder, they also are a great communicator & collaborator, and love to learn)

Good Engineer + AI = Good Engineer

OK Engineer + AI = Mediocre Engineer

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I recently watched a mid-level engineer use AI to summarize some our code, and he had it put together a big document describing all the various methods in a file, what they're used for, and so forth. It looked to me like a huge waste of time, as the code itself was already very readable (I say this as someone who recently joined the project), and the "documentation" the AI spit out wasn't that different than what you'd get just by running pydoc.

He took a couple days doing this, which was shocking to me. Such a waste of time that would have been better spent reading the code and improving any missing documentation - and most importantly asking teammates about necessary context that couldn't just be inferred from the code.

I hate to break it to you, but this guy probably wasn’t working at all. That sounds like a pretense to goof off.

Now I could believe an intern would do such a thing. I’ve seen a structural engineer intern spend four weeks creating a finite element model of a single concrete vault. he could have treated the top deck as a concrete beam used conservative assumptions about the loading and solved it with pen and paper in 30 minutes.

Well, said engineer is no longer working at my company. He wasn't exactly the best developer...

I sort of think of it in terms of self-deskilling.

If an OK engineer is still actively trying to learn, making mistakes, memorizing essentials, etc. then there is no issue.

On the other hand, if they're surrendering 100% of their judgment to AI, then they will be mediocre.

The same people who just copy-pasted stack overflow answers and didn't understand why or how things work are now using AI to create stuff that they also don't understand.

And for low-stakes one-time hobby projects, they're correct to do so!

lol. I am SO glad I don't have to go to StackExchange anymore. There is something toxically awful about using advice from a thread that starts with "Why doesn't my code work?".

Is there a difference between "OK" and "Mediocre"?

“Ok” I generally associate with being adequate but could obviously be better. “Mediocre” is just inadequate.

“Mediocre” is one of those words where common parlance doesn’t quite line up with the textbook definition. e.g. from the Oxford English Dictionary: “Of middling quality; neither bad nor good...”

Some synonyms for mediocre: decent, middling, ordinary, so-so. It can mean inadequate, but it can also mean adequate.

I’m just talking about how I view/use it.

Another common synonym for mediocre: has no place on a software development team. Not technically correct, admittedly, but that's how I read that word in an software engineering context. Adequate is not good enough.

I probably should have written it as “OK Engineer--“

Not Engineer + AI = Now an Engineer

Thats the reason for high valuation of AI companies.

Of all the things I would absolutely not trust the stock market to evaluate, "technical competence" is either near or at the top.

The people deciding how much OpenAI is worth would probably struggle to run first-time setup on an iPad.

I agree. Seems like people took my comment above as my opinion. It was supposed to be argument of Linkedin type AI hype generators.

It seemed like a normative statement, to be honest, so I misunderstood your point.

"Engineer" and "someone who can produce code" are not the same thing.

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