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Comment by parliament32 | Hacker News Reader

> I still believe those who rave about it are not writing anything I would consider "engineering".

Correct. In fact, this is the entire reason for the disconnect, where it seems like half the people here think LLMs are the best thing ever and the other half are confused about where the value is in these slop generators.

The key difference is (despite everyone calling themselves an SWE nowadays) there's a difference between a "programmer" and an "engineer". Looking at OP, exactly zero of his screenshotted apps are what I would consider "engineering". Literally everything in there has been done over and over to the death. Engineering is.. novel, for lack of a better word.

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> Engineering is.. novel, for lack of a better word.

Tell that to the guys drawing up the world's 10 millionth cable suspension bridge

Actually, 10000th

https://www.bridgemeister.com/fulllist.htm

I don't think it's that helpful to try to gatekeep the "engineering" term or try to separate it into "pure" and "impure" buckets, implying that one is lesser than the other. It should be enough to just say that AI assisted development is much better at non-novel tasks than it is at novel tasks. Which makes sense: LLMs are trained on existing work, and can't do anything novel because if it was trained on a task, that task is by definition not novel.

Respectfully, it's absolutely important to "gatekeep" a title that has an established definition and certain expectations attached to the title.

OP says, "BUT YOU DON’T KNOW HOW THE CODE WORKS.. No I don’t. I have a vague idea, but you are right - I do not know how the applications are actually assembled." This is not what I would call an engineer. Or a programmer. "Prompter", at best.

And yes, this is absolutely "lesser than", just like a middleman who subcontracts his work to Fiverr (and has no understanding of the actual work) is "lesser than" an actual developer.

That's not the point being made to you. The point is that most people in the "software engineering" space are applying known tools and techniques to problems that are not groundbreaking. Very few are doing theoretical computer science, algorithm design, or whatever you think it is that should be called "engineering."

So the TL;DR here is... If you're in the business of recreating wheels - then you're in luck! We've automated wheel recreation to an acceptable degree of those wheels being true.

Most physical engineers are just applying known techniques all the time too. Most products or bridges or whatever are not solving some heretofore-unsolved problem.

It's how you use the tool that matters. Some people get bitter and try to compare it to top engineers' work on novel things as a strawman so they can go "Hah! Look how it failed!" as they swing a hammer to demonstrate it cannot chop down a tree. Because the tool is so novel and it's use us a lot more abstract than that of an axe, it is taking awhile for some to see its potential, especially if they are remembering models from even six months ago.

Engineering is just problem solving, nobody judges structural engineers for designing structures with another Simpson Strong Tie/No.2 Pine 2x4 combo because that is just another easy (and therefore cheap) way to rapidly get to the desired state. If your client/company want to pay for art, that's great! Most just want the thing done fast and robustly.

I think it's also that the potential is far from being realized yet we're constantly bombarded by braindead marketers trying to convince us that it's the best thing ever already. This is tiring especially when the leadership (not held back by any technical knowledge) believes them.

I'm sure AI will get there, I also think it's not very good yet.

Coding agents as of Jan 2026 are great at what 95% of software engineers do. For remaining 5% that do really novel stuff -- the agents will get there in a few years.

When he said 'just look at what I'v been able to build', I was expecting anything but an 'image converter'

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