No, the "essence" of engineering is having a cohesive vision for a larger plan.
No quality large scale project can exist without it. And any seasoned engineer should understand by now that no SOTA LLM can produce quality engineering at scale.
No quality large scale project can exist without it. And any seasoned engineer should understand by now that no SOTA LLM can produce quality engineering at scale.
Execute fast or get nowhere, a series of small wins get you to live long term.
If you need examples, look at game dev. There's plenty of games that have good execution but aren't fun to play or they're a confusing mess because there wasn't good overall direction.
Just because a videogame isn’t fun doesn’t mean there wasnt a cohesive engineering vision. God of War: Ragnarok is a good example of this. Excellent technical execution and (arguably) great direction but a terribly boring game.
And many games that are terribly engineered are also incredibly fun. Dark Souls is a good example - runs like ass, looks very rough even by the standards of the time when the game released, with terrible enemy AI in a combat focused game - one might even call it a confusing mess (and I laugh at the notion that it doesn’t have good direction)… despite all this it’s a classic and arguably the most influential game since its release.
Elden Ring carries a lot of legacy baggage from years of iteration on the same engine as ~~Dark~~ Demons Souls - and it’s widely considered From Software’s magnum opus and a masterpiece. Yet considering the scope of the game it is a great example of how small wins added up can solve large problems when executed with the skill and judgment gained from experience. So one might still consider it a success in terms of “engineering”.
Would From Software have been able to make the same game using Unreal Engine 5 built from scratch with dime a dozen “Unreal experts” brought in off the street? Not a chance. Want to know why western game development studios are suffering right now? Compare American layoff culture and race to the bottom economics to the retention rates of Japanese game studios like Capcom, Nintendo and other heavy hitters.
For many of the most marvellous things humans have ever built, if you take a peak behind the curtain you’ll still probably find some amount of duct tape and popsicles sticks somewhere keeping it all together.
Fun, however, is a matter of taste and you can’t engineer that.