Note on The Giddy Nothingness of Automatic Creation via Ben Sigelman

If whatever I was doing on the kitchen counter is now called “software engineering,” then ordering food at a restaurant should be called “cooking.” As much as I marvel in this new and (dare I say) magical way of manifesting products and services from thin air, I question whether it is truly a creative process anymore. Inasmuch as we pursue craftsmanship as a goal unto itself, what’s the point for us humans when the machines are going to be better, faster, and cheaper than all of us?

FROM:

Ben Sigelman

The Giddy Nothingness of Automatic Creation

Source

If you didn’t make decisions, you weren’t engineering. The engineering - the value you bring - and work is in judgement. You need to decide the trade-off to take and the checks to put in place to let the system operate. You are now building and operating a system that builds the actual code. Your value is in knowing how that system will fail, or diagnosing and discovering failure, and preventing that (while ensuring the actual goal is achieved). We always had to do that in the before times, but now the code writing is not required of you.