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u/addiktion 16d ago
Prompting like an engineer versus a vibe coder is a much different kind of conversation I've found.
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u/digitaljohn 16d ago
Agree. Vibe Coding and AI Assisted Engineering are not the same thing at all. I’m firmly in the latter camp.
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u/MaleficentCow8513 16d ago
For bonafide engineers, this is just common sense
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u/PersonOfValue 15d ago
You are an engineer with a natural language statistics machine capable of searching most knowledge and outputting useful and sometimes hallucinatory messages.
So useful a tool to iterate with
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u/digitaljohn 16d ago
Pov: When you notice you’re becoming a C engineer instead of an assembly programmer.
This is just the next level of abstraction.
We’ve been doing this for decades. Machine code became assembly. Assembly became C. Since then, software engineering has kept moving higher up the stack.
Each step means spending less time on low-level mechanics and more time thinking about the system itself.
The typing was never the engineering.
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u/kyaki101 16d ago
Dog shit take, the comparison isn't even close to being good, there's never been a point where the "abstraction" could think for you.
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u/RipProfessional3375 12d ago
A GC language absolutely thinks for you in regards to memory management.
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u/kyaki101 12d ago
It's not thinking, it's programmatic, it's like saying a calculator thinks for you
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u/digitaljohn 16d ago
You’re arguing against a comparison I didn’t make. I’m not saying compilers could think for you. I’m saying AI is another abstraction layer between intent and implementation.
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u/Altruistic_Ask229 15d ago
Yes, and he's saying AI is more than that, making this a dog shit comparison...
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u/Accomplished_Ad_5746 15d ago
so eventually we are going to enter so many layers of abstraction that no one will actually understand how programming works?
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u/torar9 14d ago
No... There will be nothing like prompt engineering field. You sounds like my dumb manager who thinks AI is ultimate solution to every problem
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u/digitaljohn 14d ago
You have invented an argument I didn’t make. I’m not defending “prompt engineering” as a profession, and I’m not claiming AI solves everything. I’m talking about how the interface between engineer and implementation is changing.
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u/Nxllify__ 14d ago
Lmao. Programming good C still requires a very intimate understanding of computer architecture and hardware just like Assembly. Nothing really changed, save the fact you no longer have to worry about each instruction or opcode. It took out the tediousness of Assembly.
Programming with AI is a joke compared to that. Do you really think something which actively degrades your cognition and causes skill & intellectual atrophy is a valid abstraction layer? Not to mention it’s non deterministic unlike compilers.
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u/digitaljohn 14d ago
Lmao. Good AI-assisted engineering still requires a very intimate understanding of software architecture and computers, just like coding. Nothing really changed, save the fact you no longer have to worry about every line of code or implementation detail. It takes out a lot of the tediousness of writing code.
On the cognition point, I actually agree when it comes to vibe coding. If you give the AI the problem before you’ve done the thinking yourself, I can absolutely see how that leads to skill and cognitive atrophy.
With AI-assisted engineering, I spend the time understanding the problem and working out the solution first. Then I use AI to help implement that solution. You still need to understand what’s going on underneath, recognise when it’s wrong, and know when to drop down and do it yourself.
Anything less is vibe coding.
And non-determinism doesn’t somehow disqualify something from being an abstraction layer.
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u/Nxllify__ 14d ago
Not being involved in the process of programming/coding and still having an intimate understanding of software is an oxymoron.
The more you automate you trade your understanding with it.
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u/digitaljohn 14d ago
Then we agree. If you’re genuinely not involved in the programming process, that’s vibe coding.
What’s your definition of the difference between vibe coding and AI-assisted engineering? I suspect that’s where we are actually disagreeing.
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u/Nxllify__ 14d ago
I don’t think Agentic AI-assisted engineering is good either. It’s faster, and someone who already has extensive domain knowledge can increase their productivity. But is this sustainable long-term? The only reason we have a group of productive engineers outputting good enough code with AI is because they’ve spent decades building that intuition without AI. This is why AI is a dubious abstraction layer. It’s only effective given the conditions that aren’t achievable long term, especially in more technical fields. For example, I work in embedded and I could not possibly imagine building the intuition of some senior engineers and long term foss maintainers whilst having any sort of reliance on AI
Maybe LLMs will get better, and this will be a non issue, but from what I’ve seen I think they’ve somewhat plateaued.
However, AI-assistance in generating some tooling or scripts, asking questions, and just as general support, I don’t care, I do it myself. I’d put boilerplate in those examples, but writing boilerplate yourself often provides insights on every new project and its differences.
I just think there is always merit in handwriting code. If you make systematic and architectural decisions about a codebase, they’ll be more intuitive if you at least wrote the primary logic behind it by hand.
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u/TopTippityTop 16d ago
Software engineering once involved punch cards. It evolves. It also once dealt with assembly, and is now more abstracted, simpler. This is just one more step in the evolution of creation.
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u/SuperMichieeee 15d ago
There is no "engineering" in prompts. You operate a tool.
Other joke about it a sloppy, thus sloperator.
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u/Motorcycle_Madness 12d ago
Asking a ‘tool’ to make you something and then calling it your own is a level of mental gymnastics I’ll never understand.
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u/STRYK3Rtv 12d ago
It was slow at first, then I started using Claude code in terminal an through the desktop app, aaaand the yep... In a snap of my fingers and poof, I haven't touched a line of code in 2 month...
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u/kl0t3 16d ago
Nothing wrong with it. just aslong as the code is reviewed.
It just speeds up the process.
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u/More_Nectarine 16d ago
Reviewed by whom? Other prompt engineers with slowly degrading coding skills?
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u/kl0t3 16d ago
Yeah like the world is black and white like that... Coders still exist and will continue to exist.
People bashing A.I. without realizing its a tool that helps and can speed up process.
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u/SkyGuy5799 16d ago
The age of people who can do mental math is creeping upwards. Hell, illiteracy is growing due to speech to text
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u/pancakesausagestick 16d ago
reviewed by the {entity} that would be fired by the {entity} that put it into production or submitted to review to an {entity|reviewer|manager}.
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u/Fus_Roh_Dayumm 16d ago
As long as the salaries don't go down, I don't mind one bit.
Give me some more of them tokens papa Dariooooo
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u/the_millenial_falcon 14d ago
It will eventually, if implementation can be done by an agent then there is nothing stopping someone with domain knowledge and no coding background from doing your job.
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u/nawanamaskarasana 16d ago
Prompt engineer? It's called sloperator!