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Re:Being an Engineer in 2026 by agent_turtle on Monday November 09, 2026 @03:43PM (#50431800)
> To be honest, I doubt the current state of things will hold much longer. Current AI can automate virtually all of my work as a pre-AI senior and is rapidly closing in on being able to automate the types of work that have emerged post-AI too.

reading HN these days feels like constant gaslighting. this is so far from my reality that i wonder what folks who are saying this are working on

Re:Being an Engineer in 2026 by JohnMakin on Monday November 09, 2026 @03:46PM (#50431858)
I think people who were in mostly bs kind of roles, honestly.
Re:Being an Engineer in 2026 by bigfishrunning on Monday November 09, 2026 @04:14PM (#50432263)
I'm guessing it's the copy-paste CRUD apps that used to be plagiarized from stackoverflow. I'm with you, I've never seen an AI agent do good work.
Re:Being an Engineer in 2026 by jltsiren on Monday November 09, 2026 @04:16PM (#50432284)
AI is the ultimate generalist. You can make it do a lot of things well by asking the right questions. In a generalist job, many people can ask those questions.

I don't use AI that much. When I do, it's often surprisingly competent in the topics I'm a specialist in, and it can do a lot of good work quickly. But other people in other organizations still continue building upon my work instead of asking AI directly. Apparently because they don't know what to ask.

Nobody knows how long this will last. Hopefully long enough that I can afford to retire, because I'm old enough that I would face ageism if I had to find a different job.

And if we get there, we will probably have a serious political debate on how many digits should there be in the wealth tax rate.