TJT
Mr. Poopybutthole
- 47,099
- 129,371
The value you provide as a staff/principal engineer is rarely the code you write. It's understanding design patterns and various technologies. When does it make sense to do X instead of Y when both have the same immediate outcome but different longterm implications. You learn this kind of expertise almost explicitly through years of interactions across dozens of projects, use cases, business models, coding frameworks, technologies, and so on.
This will always be where AI fails and where juniors with AI will make AI fail spectacularly. As constraining the AI to your specific use case with the long term implications in mind is just not something a 27 year old engineer will do in most cases. Because they had no idea of the downstream effect of using Y when X actually makes it easier for downstream dependencies for various reasons. But both achieved the same immediate output.
Most of us have spent years dealing with this exact kind of technical debt. All organizations create this and all orgs have it but the difference becomes when you spend 50% of your engineering capacity trying to keep day to day functionality due to tech debt or 10%. That kind of thing.
- 2
