Just an Engineer

Open Twitter or LinkedIn any day and someone's having a meltdown about AI.

Some thread about an agent nuking a prod database. Or hallucinating a function. Or shipping garbage to staging. Same vibe every week. And to be clear, the screwups are real. Some of the people pointing them out are engineers I genuinely respect.

But the screwups are not the story.

Remember when typing your credit card into a website felt insane? People said don't do it, you'll get robbed. And honestly, they weren't wrong. Fraud was real. Then we built better systems around it. Now I tap my phone at the supermarket in Dénia and don't think about it once.

This whole AI coding thing is just like two weeks old. Useful enough to be dangerous. Dangerous enough to scare people. Too useful to go away. But the real panic is not about safety. It's about identity.

The ones losing it the loudest are usually the ones whose whole self-image is "I am an engineer." The customer, the tradeoffs, the timing, the weird human mess around the code? That's somebody else's problem.

Just an engineer. Clean ticket. Closed door. Perfect PR. That job has been shrinking for years. AI just made it faster and more obvious.

For the last few years, the engineers I've seen stay sharp had one thing in common. They could hold both sides. Write the code AND tell you why the feature shouldn't ship. Build the thing AND still see the customer's actual problem. The job was never "write code." It was to turn ambiguity into something useful.

Code got cheaper. Context got more expensive.

So to the engineers in my timeline losing it about AI:

Some of your receipts are real. The thing eating your career still isn't AI.

It's the engineer next to you who stopped arguing about whether this counts as "real engineering" and started building with it. They've been at it for a year. You didn't notice because you've been too busy collecting receipts.

They're faster now. Not because they stopped being engineers. Because they stopped being just engineers.

Code was the moat. AI filled it in. Taste is the moat now.