I used to do that exact job 10 years ago (without AI, obviously). I figure that career would be very different now.

There was something exciting about sleuthing out how those old machines worked: we used a black box approach, sending in test samples, recording the output, and comparing against the digital algorithm’s output. Trial and error, slowly building a sense of what sort of filter or harmonics could bend a waveform one way or another.

I feel like some of this is going to be lost to prompting, the same way hand-tool woodworking has been lost to power tools.