I asked a candidate why they were looking for another position. It was not the money nor the title: “I feel there is no longer respect here for being an engineer. People just assume everything can be built in half an hour.”
But features are valued on whether they actually solve users’ problems, rarely on the time they take. That didn’t change. What does seem to change is the amount of bullshit engineers deal with to get there. A confident solution costs one prompt now, and the estimate that comes with it costs even less. Every plausible solution is one we need to take apart before we can build anything.
So we get handed solutions, wrapped in half-hour estimates, by people who know far less about building them and spend less time in the problem they came from. Some of the bullshit we even produce ourselves. An engineer demoing “took me ten minutes” is boasting to other engineers, and the boast sets the price the rest of us are then quoted.
What slackens is everyone’s appreciation of what building costs. Funny enough, it feels like the model is getting better at looking right faster than it is getting right. More bullshit, then.