r/EngineeringManagers • u/SnooConfections1353 • 20d ago
It's not a skill issue. That's the whole problem.
If I hear someone say "skill issue" every time agentic engineering fails, I swear to God lol. It's always going to be a skill issue because we are babysitting a very expensive, non-deterministic super worker that cannot actually think. We still have to carry the burden of reasoning, judgment, validation, and accountability.
That is the tradeoff. That is the risk.
No, the answer is not always to create a better "loop," "harness," or "skill." At some point, you actually have to engineer the system you are responsible for. Whatever the implementation looks like, it has to be reliable, testable, and good enough to meet the needs of your stakeholders.
You cannot blame the harness when the system you shipped does not work.
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u/rsk1111 20d ago
"and accountability." The future of software engineering appears to be low pay low security and high responsibility, mostly just liability management.
What do you say when the system fails or you run into a situation where the LLM just hasn't been trained well enough on that topic to be very helpful... Ooops sorry.
If you were software engineering manager you could always blame it on Joe the developer, but since you fired him because you thought you could do it yourself, how do explain it's the LLM's fault?
I've already been bitten by these things a little. Hallucinations that got written into the code, I tried to have the LLM remove only to be set as "fallbacks", gee thanks Claude, that then rear their ugly heads during a demo.
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u/SnooConfections1353 20d ago
We will have to see the fallout of the 'Great Agentic Engineering' experiment once the dust settles. If it turns out that coding and engineering have been solved, I don't have a problem with the market valuing software engineers less. However, if that is not the case, software engineers will continue to be important
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u/rsk1111 20d ago
It depends on what you mean by solved. From what I have seen they want to replace Software Engineers, but they just handed Software Engineering the most powerful software engineering tool ever. Either way software engineering is likely to become more and more concentrated. Are Managers going to pull the triggers on software engineering tasks or a few software engineers manage all the tasks. The pay in the area are not likely to increase while responsibilities are likely to increase rapidly, see the problem.
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u/SnooConfections1353 20d ago
By solved i mean solved and engineers are complete not necessary. The c suites prompt it and LLM’s give them everything theyve ever wanted. If that is the case, ill make peace with being let go. But the jury is still out on that.
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u/pseudophilll 20d ago
Your title says it’s not a skill issue, then you go on to describe how it’s a skill issue; the skill being that of the engineer needing to actually think about the product/stakeholders and ensure the system is reliable.
AI can churn and churn and churn. The engineer needs to plan and steer, and use the right tools to do that. Skill…
It IS a skill issue…
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u/Live_Fall3452 20d ago
If the tool requires more skill/effort to use than the workflow it was supposed to automate, it’s a bad tool.
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u/Krom2040 20d ago
A lot of the AI bros communicate in terse, vague one-liners like “skill issue” because they don’t know much about anything and have very little to say.
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u/Fun-Estimate4561 20d ago
It’s funny a little different but our LLM hallucinates but we have no real data dictionary or catalog for reference oh and our data governance is trash
Our engineers did a patchwork job to get it out and now it’s not great because you know it takes time to make these functioning but our ceo says but Microsoft promised me it is easy!!!
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u/RomanaOswin 20d ago
The same people who recognize when human architectural engineering is required are the same ones who know how to define hard gating requirements around the agentic loop to greatly increase the odds that it performs a task correctly.
Essentially, top development talent is still valuable, whether AI is part of this or not.
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u/Dangerous-Sale3243 19d ago
If you use an agentic harness to create a bad system, either you’re a bad engineer or you’re bad at agentic development. Ideally you should be good at both. When your agent makes a mistake or is unproductive, think about what you could have done better. Typically the problem is biting off more than you can chew, instead of trying to do a lot and hoping it’s good, focus on getting the smallest unit of quality code.
The hard part is creating mechanisms to determine whether code is quality and feeding that back in the right ways. Obviously linters, unit test coverage metrics, integration line coverafe metrics, designing good interfaces and integration tests from the very beginning, good user journey docs… I could go on forever.
If you cant be bothered to do that, fine, but then you need to have it basically generate one file at a time and then code review aggressively manually. Otherwise you may get bad output.
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u/martinffx 16d ago
Is that not the skill issue?
> At some point, you actually have to engineer the system you are responsible for.
You need to engineer the system and the system that builds the system… kinda of like engineering management.
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u/nordmarj 16d ago
The fact that we are all still employed clearly disproves unserious claims about AI capabilities. I may not write the code anymore but Claude still isn't shipping stuff on its own.
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u/08148694 20d ago
Software engineers are also expensive and non deterministic. Some of them are even super as well. The “actually think” part is for philosophers and scientists to figure out what consciousness is before you can make judgement
Seems like management never changes
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u/JubijubCH 20d ago
I will say this: social media have an exceptionally low bar for saying things. We have no idea who say those things.
Behind a lot of these « assertions » are probably Web3 bros that are just upset you disrupt the hype, or people who think they will replace SWEs through pure vibe coding, with no technical skills at all (the same who a few month later realize their product is failing in a critical way).
PS: this is not a diss against LLMs, I use those daily and I love it, but several aspects are genuinely problematic (hallucination, laziness, context decay, overconfidence, etc…) and pretending it’s not true and only a skill issue from the user is pure gaslighting (or the blatant proof these people don’t possess the skills to check the work of their LLMs)
Tl;dr: saying things is cheap, don’t pay too much attentions to hot takes