ProgrammerHumor
engineer2019vsUser2025
Discussion
If r/vibecoding could read, they'd be very upset.
— Principal Moss, probably
I want to be like engineers back then but I am afraid that If I do that I would be left behind but I am sick of ai slop. I am using it so much that I feel like I am getting dumber.
Statistically, yes you are. It has been found that AI usage over a long period of time can cause an atrophy of skill and(for chatbots) social abilities.
Got a source for that? The only study that is sort of related to this topic that I know of is this study from a month ago, and although they found interesting results, their conclusion definitely does not align with yours.
These are my sources.
Prompt engineering is to engineering like writing html is to programming.
I write prompts to generate other prompts that do things I want to do https://i.pinimg.com/736x/f8/97/04/f897048e299ece14fbdc14add4916d20.jpg
As someone who did write classifiers and NNs from scratch. I can agree with this.
I got a master in data science and AI and I can confirm that nowadays, except if you work for OpenAI or HuggingFace, programming in AI is basically that. It's sad. And not because it's easier, that's not the point. It's just incredibly boring.
Training your own algorithm from scratch and understanding how it works under the hoods is a full other set of experiences if compared to using an API. Nowadays AI is just about using APIs. And that doesn't make you an AI engineer
I can't believe that engineers back then made everything from scratch flawlessly. Building these networks and systems from absolute scratch is just mind blowing
Even the hardware.
This is the 2019 vs 2025 meme, you're looking for the 1975 vs 2019 meme
If you squint it's the same picture.
One could argue about the stated compute usage, but else?
The idea of NN are as old as computers…
Sorry, guess I've just been itching for any excuse to reference that thing. The idea of optimising a CPU for a specific programming language, instead of optimising a language for a specific CPU, always struck me as pretty wild.
I actually coded is LISP for one of my old jobs. The P must stand for parentheses. Sooooo many parentheses lmao
Obligatory.
Additionally obligatory.
To be quiet frank - it's not that hard. The math and algorithms are usually quite simple.
But how will Frank tell us if he’s quiet?
I mean, that’s why they get paid so well? I do data compression algorithms as intern :D
Yeah... Flawlessly... You must be too young to remember things like random undiscovered backprop or accumulation bugs being found after YEARS in pytorch.