AI this, AI that. Unless you've been living under a rock, you know that one cannot speak about technology and programming without touching on AI. I am personally conflicted on how I feel about it. On the one hand, I won't lie and say that I am not at least a little concerned about job safety and the longevity of a career in software engineering. One cannot help but see the constant doomer posts about how "software engineering has been solved". On the other other hand, after having used AI consistently both within the context of a professional job and on side projects, I can't help but feel that our jobs as engineers are actually quite safe.

I have seen so many posts about people "vibe coding" a fancy new project and those projects going on to be funded. As an Engineer, my brain immediately goes to questions like, "will it scale?", "is it secure?", "do you even know how it works?". And listen, I've tried this vibe coding thing everyone keeps talking about, but for me, it doesn't feel right to pump out code just for the sake of pumping it out without fully understanding what that code is doing.

The more I use AI, the more I see it and understand it as a tool. As this weird, unwieldly, magical tool that one must be very careful with. A tool that begs of its users to be extremely careful with. A tool that, if you get lazy with it, will leave you little future traps waiting for you to bite you in the ass.