Non-engineers struggle to produce reliable software using AI tools due to a lack of engineering mindset and verification skills

Signals over time

2 observed signals across 1 sources, tracked for 2 days. Confidence: low.

What people are saying Observed

• “I think senior engineers find it very difficult to give up on line-by-line review Thanks, hearing that renewed some of my hope for the future! I'm definitely in that camp. The tools need to be as reliable as my compiler at faithfully expressing my intent. Two inherent headwinds: Their non-deterministic nature makes this difficult for me to trust. And the imprecision of the human language. Elaborating on the second... Source code can be a handy shorthand. It was designed for the purpose. If my level of abstraction (or "programming language") is the English language, it's going to be a lot more "code" to navigate. That demands highly structured organization, reliance on diagrams, methodical vigilance for edge cases which may not be as readily elicited, etc. Admittedly, design hygiene that should already be the case if you're diligent, but I've seen how those areas can be a weak point in practice - particularly in some corporate environments where the developers are stretched thin, and as a result the culture sacrifices discipline. In other words: Exactly the place where everyone says AI is supposed to be a revolutionary force multiplier. I agre”

  Hacker News · frustration

• “>The building of the software happens trivially now. You do not need a software engineer, sorry guys. This part is quite "load-bearing". I heard from someone who worked at Lovable that what most customers produce with that magical textbox is software that shouldn't go anywhere near production. Apparently the problem of thinking like an engineer is not solved by these AI tools. Most people who are not software engineers by trade are not capable of verifying what they produced, nor would they even consider needing to. No offence, I think you might be a classic case of "senior who forgot how it feels to be junior", where after a lot work experience deva start taking their software engineering instincts for granted and forget that they are a skill that takes years to master. You can prompt an AI for a solution, you can even prompt it for ideas, but you cannot prompt it to think for you.”

  Hacker News · frustration