What if AI removes the friction that makes good engineers?
What If AI Removes the Friction That Makes Good Engineers?Leonard ThieleJul 29, 20262ShareA few years ago, implementing authentication, debugging an unfamiliar library, or building a small personal website might have taken hours or days. Today, we can describe the task to an AI and watch it implement something impressive in minutes.By using LLMs in software engineering we have recently removed an extraordinary amount of friction from creating software. Sure, most of it was tedious, but some of it may have actually been necessary.I’m thinking about this while reading The Craftsman by Richard Sennett.
- ▪What If AI Removes the Friction That Makes Good Engineers?Leonard ThieleJul 29, 20262ShareA few years ago, implementing authentication, debugging an unfamiliar library, or building a small personal website might have taken hours or days.
- ▪Today, we can describe the task to an AI and watch it implement something impressive in minutes.By using LLMs in software engineering we have recently removed an extraordinary amount of friction from creating software.
- ▪Sure, most of it was tedious, but some of it may have actually been necessary.I’m thinking about this while reading The Craftsman by Richard Sennett.
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Record
| Original publisher | Hacker News (AI / LLM) |
| Canonical URL | https://leonardthiele.substack.com/p/what-if-ai-removes-the-friction |
| Publication time | Thu, 30 Jul 2026 14:40:40 +0000 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-07-30T14:42:06.611Z |
| Last seen | 2026-07-30T14:42:06.611Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | fNUBMDiwRdFM · 1 stories |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
Rights status (four layers)
WeSearch handling by dimension
| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
What If AI Removes the Friction That Makes Good Engineers?Leonard ThieleJul 29, 20262ShareA few years ago, implementing authentication, debugging an unfamiliar library, or building a small personal website might have taken hours or days. Today, we can describe the task to an AI and watch it implement something impressive in minutes.By using LLMs in software engineering we have recently removed an extraordinary amount of friction from creating software. Sure, most of it was tedious, but some of it may have actually been necessary.I’m thinking about this while reading The Craftsman by Richard Sennett.
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Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at Hacker News (AI / LLM).
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