Comment by 9rx 12 hours ago
> When using a pen you become a poet ?
No. By definition, a poet writes poems. Not all pen use leads to poems.
By definition, engineers build systems. What else can you do with code (and LLMs; same thing) other than build systems?
You can make a lot of slop of all different sorts with LLMs. That has very little in common with building systems.
It's not just the definition I use, it is the most common definition people use according to the records we keep.
And yes, someone who builds a system to generate Twitter content or maintains a coffee machine are definitely engineers.
Professional engineering societies don't like that fact and often try to usurp the term for their own financial gain, but that's not how English works. Definitions derive from use, not what a small group of people wish were so, and the record that keeps track of use is abundantly clear how the word is most commonly used.
Slop doesn't suggest the difference is only in quality, but also in form. Words have meanings, ya know?
I can have an LLM generate me code-like text all day long, but that doesn't means it's building a system. Just like I can eat Chicken McNuggets all day long, but that doesn't mean I'm eating a roast chicken.
> I can have an LLM generate me code-like text all day long, but that doesn't means it's building a system.
I don't follow. An LLM doesn't magically output code-like text, or anything else for that matter, on a whim. You have to build a system that describes your intent to the machine. Only then might it output code-like text, if that's what your system describes. It's not the execution of your code that makes you an engineer. It's building a system that can be executed in the first place that makes you a (software) engineer.
wow epic comeback man can you share the prompt you used to generate it?
In mechanical engineering you can be an engineer or a mechanic, or other things (like a hobbies or different degrees of casual work), and they're no interchangeable.
I think being an engineer implies it's a profession you've trained in and you're implementing the science behind it in a practical manor in some capacity (like a computer scientist studies computers, a computer engineer implements and builds the systems based upon this science).
> In mechanical engineering you can be an engineer or a mechanic, or other things
Sure. While some mechanics may sometimes find themselves having to design things to carry out their work (in which case they would be engineers during that time), generally speaking mechanics carry out the physical replacement of what engineers have already designed. They are not designing things themselves.
But there is no mechanic analog in computing. At least there isn't a human mechanic analog. One is always operating at the design level, regardless of whether the design is written in C, Rust, or natural language. All the engineering-adjacent work you find in other engineering disciplines is done by the computer in the software realm.
> I think being an engineer implies it's a profession you've trained in and you're implementing the science behind it in a practical manor in some capacity
That's what "professional engineer" implies, but we're talking about "engineer". There is no such connotations in the word engineer alone, hence the existence of the PE term.
idk man, plenty of people have "ai" gf/bf/therapist, ask "ai" for vacation trip ideas, recipes, gym workouts, &c. I wouldn't even be surprised if most tokens were used on non software engineering tasks.
I have a zombie developer, coder, idk how to call them, in my team who doesn't talk to anyone, writes shit tier PRs and spends all day long talking to chatgpt. They're a prompter, a chatter, a waste of money, but certainly not an engineer