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Hey Shawn! Always enjoy your writing. I think you've done well laying out what a lot of people want "AI Engineer" to mean at this moment in time. My concern (c

Hey Shawn! Always enjoy your writing. I think you've done well laying out what a lot of people want "AI Engineer" to mean at this moment in time. My concern (coming fresh out of the absolute semantic nightmare that was the "serverless" community) is that the term AI is so hopelessly overloaded, and has been such a moving target over the years, that it's unlikely that a plurality of people will ever share your mental model of what an "AI Engineer" is/ does / knows / is paid. Personally I've been using Generative Engineering / GenEng [0] to describe the professional practice of building stuff with AI as your pair programmer. I recognize some are pulling away from the term "generative", but to me it feels like a better anchor into the specific flavor of AI we're talking about. [0] https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/ai-machine-learning/the-rise-of-geneng-how-ai-changes-the-developer-role https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/ai-machine-learning/t...

giovannibonetti 3y ago
Maybe Text Processing Engineer or Text Engineer for short could express well that this person handles both text analysis and synthesis. It is analogous to the term Data Engineer, which describes someone that handles data processing and pipelines in general.
ehnto 3y ago
Generative isn't perfect for similar reasons perhaps, I consider procedural generarion adjacent to machine learning based generation so it would need to encompass both to make sense to me.
swyx 3y ago
hey Forrest! thanks so much! agree with the semantic overload risk, but i think at this point Worse is Better is applying here. like I said in the piece I'm not starting the trend, just calling out that it's already under way.
sanderjd 3y ago
Hmm, I think "the professional practice of building stuff with AI as your pair programmer" is just "software engineering". That is, it's just one more tool to use to do the existing work. We never had "Search Engineering" or "StackOverflow Engineering" to describe the practice of building stuff using web search and stack overflow as tools...
- __loam 3y ago
  Imagine calling yourself a compiler engineer because you use a compiler.

giovannibonetti 3y ago

Maybe Text Processing Engineer or Text Engineer for short could express well that this person handles both text analysis and synthesis. It is analogous to the term Data Engineer, which describes someone that handles data processing and pipelines in general.

ehnto 3y ago

Generative isn't perfect for similar reasons perhaps, I consider procedural generarion adjacent to machine learning based generation so it would need to encompass both to make sense to me.

swyx 3y ago

hey Forrest! thanks so much! agree with the semantic overload risk, but i think at this point Worse is Better is applying here. like I said in the piece I'm not starting the trend, just calling out that it's already under way.

sanderjd 3y ago

Hmm, I think "the professional practice of building stuff with AI as your pair programmer" is just "software engineering". That is, it's just one more tool to use to do the existing work. We never had "Search Engineering" or "StackOverflow Engineering" to describe the practice of building stuff using web search and stack overflow as tools...

__loam 3y ago
Imagine calling yourself a compiler engineer because you use a compiler.