AI Didn't Remove the Engineering Work. It Just Made It Easier to Pretend You Did.
On September 15, India — along with Sri Lanka and Tanzania — celebrates Engineer's Day, marking the birth anniversary of Sir M. Visvesvaraya. He was responsible for major irrigation and water-management projects, including the Krishna Raja Sagara Dam, and pioneered an automatic water-floodgate system first installed at the Khadakvasla Reservoir. He never called himself a founder. He was too busy…
On September 15, India and other nations commemorate Engineer's Day, honoring Sir M. Visvesvaraya, whose contributions to civil engineering include the construction of the Krishna Raja Sagara Dam and the automatic water-floodgate system at Khadakvasla Reservoir. A recent trend has seen people underestimate the true nature of engineering, thanks in part to the rise of AI coding tools.
Upon inputting a prompt into these tools, users can quickly generate a functioning website and claim to be a "founder." However, this overlooks the essential engineering principles and considerations that should accompany such projects. A prime example of this conflation is a recent Build-in-Public challenge where a developer optimized push notifications in a web application, believing they had completed a complex task.
However, the real issue lay in a flawed assumption that the application's visibility status equated to user attention. The developer's solution, while impressive, ultimately led to a broken product. This highlights the importance of understanding the underlying principles and mechanisms that make engineering work, rather than merely producing a working product.
Written by urgent.news from Dev.to's reporting — not their text. Machine-written — may contain errors; check the original before relying on it.
