Citizen Devs: Everyone is an engineer now

Anyone can buy a table saw. Doesn't make you a carpenter and it doesn't mean you can/should build anything.

My criteria is very simple, could you handwrite the code if you needed to. Could you write this code without the LLM writing it for you. Could you write this code without the IDE auto-completing it for you. You could take it all the way to, could you write the assembly if you needed to. Of course, the complexity of the ask and the timeline has to be commensurate with the power of your tooling at each level.

Yeah, right.

That usually requires a 3 to 5 year degree, and possibly professional exam.

Having the AI do the work doesn't make one an engineer.

Just like one doesn't become a writer by owning a typewriter or a word processor.

is it going to be like YouTube, where everyone was a video artist suddenly?

Ah yeah, if I ask a company to design and build me a bridge, I'm a bridge engineer!

COBOL

Visual Basic

Low-Code

Power Platform

Although AI substantially changes the situation the hard part of being an engineer was never the code.

A technician is defined by the tools they work with, an engineer is defined by the problems they can solve. Taking a dozen different business processes and stakeholders and figuring out how to actually solve the problems they have is engineering.

Yes comrade, we are all equalizing for three people to become multi-trillionaires.

The level of propaganda reaches Maoist proportions.

Hack the planet!

There's lots of caveats asterisks & limitations, sure sure sure: we hear you Technically Correct repliers, here to spread your Well Actually naysayings.

But at the end of the day: heck yes. So much heck yes. Even if you are not engineering well, just the ability to have your agent go in and do reconissance of systems. "Reverse engineer this Bluetooth protocol for my device" or what I'm doing now, "reverse engineer my epaper display controller"... People have an incredibly powerful tool for assessing the world, for finding out.

And I for one strongly believe that will beget the great virous circle of lovely lovely fucking around. A wheel that is humanity's best invention, best motivation, best traction, best side, and one that any self proclaimed Hacker if any spirit ought be out of their seats cheering raving with excitement happy for.

I've noticed a near 1:1 overlap of people who advocate against shadow development, and people experiencing status anxiety about the fact that AI has proven that they barely pass the bar.

Some arguments about shadow development and IT are valid, like security and who takes ownership after the original developers leave, but they don't really account for the reality that organizations expand constantly, business needs are perpetually exploding and most development shops are so mired in business requirements and bureaucracy that there's genuinely no value involved with interacting with them.