AI Is Turning Engineers into Farmers, Doctors and Gardeners
The article discusses how AI is transforming the role of engineers, likening their work to farming and gardening rather than traditional coding. Engineers now rely on AI to generate code from prompts, which accelerates the development process but often results in unfamiliar code that requires further modification. This shift necessitates a new approach to understanding and changing code, similar to how doctors learn and adapt to complex systems they did not create.
- ▪AI is changing the role of engineers by allowing them to generate code from prompts instead of writing it by hand.
- ▪The generated code often requires modifications, as it is based on approximate prompts rather than detailed specifications.
- ▪Engineers are compared to gardeners, needing to tend to and adapt the code rather than having an intimate understanding of its creation.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
2026-May-24 AI is turning Engineers into Farmers, Doctors and Gardeners Think about software engineering before 2022. We were building systems from the ground up. We knew how complex systems worked because we were the ones building it. Even if we didn’t have an idea about the entirety of the system, we knew people who we could ask. Even if we took years to interact with the codebase again, a few hours of digging around would bring back the fond memories of its creation. When dealing with legacy codebases, we would experiment, we would observe its results and then make more changes. But every subsequent change was ours, every change would improve our comprehension of the codebase and our command over the codebase.
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Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at Aswinmohan.
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