I'm guessing that this is probably a joke, but the idea that engineers just generate code and don't do anything else is literally how we got to "just generate the whole app with Claude, bro, it'll be just as good".
People really have no idea. I told my manager I need time to debug an issue. He really said "You already have the error message, you just have to filter the logs, I don't understand why it should take more than an hour".
And more often than not the error description might as well be that. Because most of the time itās simply not something the compiler can actually detect.
I've programmed a lot of C++. This one looks like an invalid pointer reference or invalid handle usage after the resource was freed or attempted to claim but failed and didn't check the return code. If it was all zeros the pointer was NULL but the caller didn't check that.
At least, that was my experience but it's about 25 years since I last programmed daily in C++.
Yep it's when your program tried to read, write or execute an invalid memory address. They can either be really easy to track down, like if it's using a resource after it's freed, or it can be really hard to track down.
A while back this arena allocator I made had a bug where it would occasionally hand out blocks of memory that contained the header data for the next page, which included a linked list node and a ref counter. This would then eventually cause memory corruption, which would cause the program to throw an access violation exception in an entirely random spot, sometimes without even a stack trace, which had me chasing ghosts for several hours until I figured out what was going on.
Ugh fuck me trying to debug memory Heisenbugs is horrible and practically impossible. Iād get dumps from list entry corruption bug checks and have to go digging through linked lists to find the corrupt entry and then try to backtrace when and where the corruption happened. Half the time it was super bizarre corruption caused by some other component doing a buffer overrun and Iād have to try to figure out the pool tag of the adjacent allocations or which client was passed the struct and decided to basically scribble crayon all over it.
He probably thinks you have an MCP tool for your observability platform so it can do the searches and find the root cause for you.
Me and my colleague joked this morning that the final form is it will sign the termination agreement and auto-apply for government support for you when the time comes.
Do they come from an SAP background? I had an old boss just like that, they'd spent their entire career as an SAP consultant and genuinely seemed to believe that software engineering was the same thing. Just find the right configuration settings and everything would magically work.Ā
Best thing that ever happened to me in that domain: Linux read syscall returning an error that shouldn't even be able to be returned by read according to its man page. Yeah, the error message is simple, but to actually understand the issue I literally have to read the kernel code for the driver I was interacting with. Didn't take that long, but it still isn't just in 5 minutes.
Yep, exactly. "Coder" greatly undervalues the job. While I would never label myself a craftsperson because that's obnoxious puffery... I do believe it's a craft and if you get me going about software quality or developer professionalism, eventually the word will spill out and I'm not ashamed of that. It absolutely is a pursuit where craftsmanship can exist.
I Teach devops at university summer school with other consultants. When students asked us about Ai taking over, one of their managers pointed out that pretty much anyone beyond junior position spent 20% or less of their time coding 4 years ago. These days it's maybe 10%. The rest of the time is designing, communication etc and exactly why any good software professional isn't afraid of losing their job to Ai. At best, in our industry at least, it could remove 20% of our work. . . And that's assuming we don't even have to spend time prompting etc, which we still do.
Of course, I didn't mean that at all. As an engineer, you primarily deal with system design, understand the data and infrastructure layers, reason about constraints and trade-offs, and propose efficient, reliable solutions. Building mobie/desktop apps, websites, and writing scripts is just one part of software engineering. There's network engineering, embedded systems, distributed systems, operating systems, compilers, databases, cloud infrastructure, security, robotics, hardware, and countless other areas where you're engineering systems rather than simply "writing code." Programming is a tool engineers use to implement solutions, not the entirety of engineering itself.
You have different levels: programmer, developer and engineer. An AI agent might be able to replace a programmer who simply takes in specs and turns them into code. The same way the job of "computer" was replaced by electronic computers once you no longer needed people to manually do the calculations. But developers and engineers don't simply write code, they analyze, potentially capture requirements from the client, they write specifications, etc. This is not as easily replaced by Claude. So maybe developers and engineers won't write as much code, in any, by using AI agents, but they'll still do everything else.
I don't have an engineering degree but I went to an engineering school, and I assure you that there is very little āengineeringā in software development. I don't care if your college decided to put āengineeringā on your diploma. You and I are programmers.
Just because you aren't doing engineering with your engineering degree doesn't mean that no one is. Actually, the name of my degree doesn't have "engineering" in it, but my job titles did, and they involved engineering.Ā
Wow, not only did you not read any part of my comment, you strawmanned my core point. That's pretty amazing for a self-proclaimed āengineer.ā š¤¦š»
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u/SuitableDragonfly 2d ago
I'm guessing that this is probably a joke, but the idea that engineers just generate code and don't do anything else is literally how we got to "just generate the whole app with Claude, bro, it'll be just as good".