Engineering Is Not Dead Because Accountability Isn’t

A lot of people have developed a gag reflex against anything touched by AI. I understand where that comes from. There is a lot of slop, maintainers are tired of reviewing code from people who do not understand it, and people are tired of predictable cadence. We’re also heading toward a version of the future where all code will be generated. The models are good enough that for a lot of work, especially the boring repetitive kind, typing everything by hand makes very little sense. You can describe what you want, steer the model, ask for changes, review the output, and get to a working implementation much faster than before. That caused some people to jump from “models can generate code” to “engineering is dead”. That is wrong. Code Generation Is Not Engineering Engineering is not the act of producing text that happens to run or compile. Engineering is deciding what should exist. Understanding the constraints. Knowing what can go wrong. Making trade-offs. Reviewing the result. Being…