Re:Ask HN: How to Keep the Edge as an Engineer?
by egrm on Thursday November 05, 2026 @04:59PM
(#50385080)
I think for the meantime you are right, and its been the philosophy i had been applying to my work. However recently I'd been reconsidering this, as AI gets increasingly capable of designing the architecture better than me, ofcourse not yet perfect, but scarily good. I find myself just reading over and approving the architecture it proposed based on the initial idea i gave it. Funnier thing is i had been building a tool that attempts to replace me in my work, maybe it's to blame.
When I got into tech, as an engineer, I enjoyed learning as much as I could about building systems.
Systems are comprised of technology, people, and business needs.
How can we help our customers in the best way possible given some constraints (usually $$).
For example, perhaps at the current scale, the customer needs search but the company cannot afford deploying ElasticSearch. You are already using postgres, and you have 80 million candidate records. How can you make this system work until you have a billion records and need ES?
Honestly, I have no idea what the future holds but this is how I view things.