The end user of a bridge doesn’t care about most things the engineer who designed it does. They care that the bridge spans the gap and is safe to use. The compa

The end user of a bridge doesn’t care about most things the engineer who designed it does. They care that the bridge spans the gap and is safe to use. The company building the bridge and the group financing its construction care about a few more things like how much it will cost to provide those things to the end user, how long it will last. The engineer cares about a few more things: will the tolerances in the materials used in the struts account for the shearing forces of the most extreme weather in the region? So it is with software. You might not need a blueprint if you’re building a shed in your back yard. This is the kind of software that and user might write or script themselves. If it’s kind of off nobody is going to get hurt. In many cities in North America you can’t construct a dwelling with plumbing connections to a sewer and a permanent foundation without an engineer. And you need an engineer and a blueprint to get the license to go ahead with your construction. Because if you get it wrong you can make people in the dwelling sick and damage the surrounding environment and infrastructure. Software-wise this is where you’re handling other people’s sensitive data. You probably have more than one component that needs to interact with others. If you get it wrong people could lose money, assets could get damaged, etc. This is where I think the software industry needs to figure out liability and maybe professionalize a bit. Right now the liability is with the company and the deterrents are basically no worse than a speeding ticket in most cases. It’s more profitable to keep speeding and pay off the ticket than to prevent harm from throwing out sloppy code and seeing what sticks. Then if you are building a sky scraper… well yeah, that’s the large scale stuff you build at big tech. There are different degrees of software with different requirements. While not engineers by professional accreditation, in practice I would say most software developers are doing engineering… or trying. What I agree with in the article is that AI tools make bad engineering easier. That is for people building houses and skyscrapers who should be thinking about blueprints: they are working under assumptions that the AI is “smart” and will build sky-scrapers for them. They’re not thinking about the things they ought to be and less about things that will pass on to the customers: cost and a product that isn’t fit for use. A bridge that falls down if you drive too fast over it isn’t a useful bridge even though it looks like a bridge.