alt Hacker NewsYeah, "Engineers don't try" is a frustrating statement. We've all tried generative AI, and there's not that much to it — you put text in, you get text back out. Some models are better at some tasks, some tools are better at finding the right text and connecting it to the right actions, some tools provide a better wrapper around the text-generation process. Certain jobs are very easy for AI to do, others are impossible (but the AI lies about them).
A lot of us tried it and just said, "huh, that's interesting" and then went back to work. We hear AI advocates say that their workflow is amazing, but we watch videos of their workflow, and it doesn't look that great. We hear AI advocates say "the next release is about to change everything!", but this knowledge isn't actionable or even accurate.
There's just not much value in chasing the endless AI news cycle, constantly believing that I'll fall behind if I don't read the latest details of Gemini 3.1 and ChatGPT 6.Y (Game Of The Year Edition). The engineers I know who use AI don't seem to have any particular insights about it aside from an encyclopedic knowledge of product details, all of which are changing on a monthly basis anyway.
New products that use gen AI are — by default — uninteresting to me because I know that under the hood, they're just sending text and getting text back, and the thing they're sending to is the same thing that everyone is sending to. Sure, the wrapper is nice, but I'm not paying an overhead fee for that.
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Maybe not what the OP or article is talking about, but it's super frustrating recently dealing with non/less technical mgrs, PMs, etc who now think they have this Uno card to bypass technical discussion just because they vibe coded some UI demo. Like no shit, that wasn't the hard part. But since they don't see the real/less visible past like data/auth/security, etc they act like engineers "aren't trying", less innovative, anti-AI or whatever when you bring up objections to their "whole app" they made with their AI snoopy snow cone machine.
> We hear AI advocates say that their workflow is amazing, but we watch videos of their workflow, and it doesn't look that great. We hear AI advocates say "the next release is about to change everything!", but this knowledge isn't actionable or even accurate.
There's a lot of disconnected-from-reality hustling (a.k.a lying) going on. For instance, that's practically Elon Musk's entire job, when he's actually doing it. A lot of people see those examples, think it's normal, and emulate it. There are a lot of unearned superlatives getting thrown around automatically to describe tech.
I’ve been an engineer for 20 years, for myself, small companies, and big tech, and now working for my own saas company.
There are many valid critiques of AI, but “there’s not much there” isn’t one of them.
To me, any software engineer who tries an LLM, shrugs and says “huh, that’s interesting” and then “gets back to work” is completely failing at their actual job, which is using technology to solve problems. Maybe AI isn’t the right tool for the job, but that kind of shallow dismissal indicates a closed mind, or perhaps a fear-based reaction. Either way, the market is going to punish them accordingly.
This isn’t “unfair”, but you are intentionally underselling it.
If you haven’t had a mind blown moment with AI yet, you aren’t doing it right or are anchoring in what you know vs discovering new tech.
I’m not making any case for anything, but it’s just not that hard to get excited for something that sure does seem like magic sometimes.
Edit: lol this forum :)
> Yeah, "Engineers don't try" is a frustrating statement. We've all tried generative AI, and there's not that much to it — you put text in, you get text back out.
"Engineers don't try" doesn’t refer to trying out AI in the article. It refers to trying to do something constructive and useful outside the usual corporate churn, but having given up on that because management is single-mindedly focused on AI.
One way to summarize the article is: The AI engineers are doing hype-driven AI stuff, and the other engineers have lost all ambition for anything else, because AI is the only thing that gets attention and helps the career; and they hate it.