The words we choose matter.
People have been calling me pedantic for a long time, but I’ve never seen the problem with that. Words have particular meanings. Even synonyms are just “similar”, not usually the same.
Some time back I wrote a blog post about “Why You’re NOT an Engineer (also Why It [Probably] Doesn’t Matter)”
The key point I made: there IS a difference between a coder, a programmer, a developer, and an engineer (although some people disagreed).
So why bring this up now?
Because my feed has been filling up with “future of AI” opinions again and what that means for the future of work, whether people should even bother becoming developers… Bla Bla Blah Yackity Smackity.
And I just wanted to get this off my chest again:
Code was never “the job.”
Problem solving was the job. Context, business knowledge, and dealing with people was the job. Code was just an artifact of the job.
As I and many others have been saying, AI tooling makes the code part easier. But here’s what we’re finding out more and more: the best way to work with AI is to be very specific about what you tell it. You need those skills that are “the actual job”. The same skills you usually shared with other humans. Only now you share them with the AI in a particular way.
Two points here:
Since most AI tooling is based on LLMs, which are good with words, the words we choose when prompting and instructing matter. More people are realizing this, and more people are building tools to improve this.
What does this mean for the industry? The influencers and uninformed will have you believe that “software engineering is dead.”
I strongly disagree.
Software engineering is more important than ever. As I’ve been saying for a while now, fundamentals matter and having skills and experience to know when the AI tooling is wrong is super important.
But coders? Programmers? Those who can only produce code but not build systems based on fundamentals, break things down into first principles, understand root cause analysis, know which algorithms work where and when and why?
Yeah. AI has already replaced those. Because guess what, it’s pretty good at generating code.
But being a developer or engineer? No. The AI is just a tool that makes those roles more productive.
This post was originally published on LinkedIn