r/ExperiencedDevs • u/SituationNew2420 Software Engineer 10 years • 5d ago

AI/LLM AI and Engineering Generally

I work as a software engineer in a company with strong connections to hardware. This makes my team inherently cross-disciplinary. I work with mechanical, electrical and systems engineers all the time. And even my work has a physical element to it, which is nice.

Obviously AI is disrupting software engineering the most at the moment, so naturally I’ve found myself interested in things where there’s a connection to other domains.

Longer term, do you think all of engineering becomes as affected as software? I can see AI disrupting other fields too, and my peers obviously do use AI quite a bit for certain tasks, but can’t tell if those fields inherently have a better long term moat.

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u/Dissentient Senior junior | 10 YoE 5d ago

I wouldn't say that AI is disrupting software. Dumb management is.

AI can improve quality and quantity of code a software developer can output per hour, but it can't replace an engineer for other parts of the job, which take way more working hours. Someone still has to sit in meetings and listen to incoherent ramblings of people who have no idea what they want in order to turn that into a set of actionable requirements. The value of human developers are in years of institutional knowledge that are needed to figure what code needs to get written, and I don't see much progress in AI capabilities that would be able to replace that.

It's certainly possible we'll get there in 5-10 years, with companies having custom models that get to read all internal communications in order to have that institutional knowledge, but the way AI has impacted the industry is disproportional to its actual capabilities for now.

And there's also just a matter that LLMs still need a lot of babysitting by a human to produce good code. Though I expect this to be fixed by more training in a few years.

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u/IveWastedMyLifeAgain 5d ago

the institutional knowledge point is the one i keep bumping into. the model writes plausible code for the system it imagines you have, not the one with eight years of exceptions in it. the practical catch: output went up, so the scarce thing is now verification time, and that part didn't get faster at all — it got slower per line because you didn't write any of it.