Do not despair for engineering

If I could capture the spirit of this article in one sentence, I would encourage people to not despair about the current status of engineering, but to realize that in times of change such as these, there is a light at the end of the tunnel, and it's not that purported by some social-media famous sirens, made of abandonment and lack of ingenuity. It is that of personal development, original ideas, rediscovery of truth and curiosity as well as of questioning fatalist dogmas.

A moment of clarity is sufficient to reveal that the AI maximalist narratives rest on the shaky foundation of incorrect presuppositions and personal opinions presented as truths, all of which are easy to criticize by those keen enough to pay attention to the details. All-encompassing narratives are presented as an inescapable destiny, this alone authorises us to dismiss them as fallacious. It is a self-deception, even foolish, to pretend to rationalize non-falsifiable positions.

The energies that have set in motion the push for AI are rather extreme, this is not a question of opposing to such processes because it is simply beside the point, in the same way as it is incorrect to point at the symptoms believing they are the disease.

Looking at the exchanges in our media, it is clear that factions are forming. But let's be clear, the contrapposition is as much that of ideas as it is of worldviews and human attitudes. I'd say that our transitional period assumes the characteristics of an ordeal, even a spiritual fight, and it's not at all about technological contingencies. This is typical for all those historical times where the sum of the inconsistencies and delayed solutions of prior times have reached a culmination.

Some have abandoned themselves to an array of surrogates, replacing the real for poorly concocted imitations which are but mere signs with vague meaning. Glaring examples are the strange game remixes made of super-mario shotgunning around in Halo or the buggy copy of some Adobe products.

A smaller portion of individuals have retained a strong grip on reality, and are perhaps in a good position to turn the negatives into positives. Most have realized that a significant shift is in place even though it's difficult to define precisely the nature and extent of the change.

Without a doubt this is not the end of engineering. If the current state of affairs is disheartening, let's focus on the idea that engineering has always been a much deeper than what we see in our daily works. I would not despair if the change would be limited to the actual typing of the code, but I'd try to focus on design problems, those certainly abound at all times. Turning away from design and understanding is already revealing itself to be an expensive mistake.

I think much of the power of the fatalism is due to an inaccurate view of where we have been in the last 10 years. Look at how the market, well before AI, was already veering towards SaaS and managed platforms (especially in Data engineering) and it's still going in that direction with AI. Some engineering practices were already made mostly of babysitting those platforms. On the other hand you could be on the side of those creating one of those platforms. There are many interesting poblems to solve if you're providing solutions. We need engineering especially because integrating AI effectively and securely is not trivial and many business are struggling with it.

Conclusion

In this time of transition, engineering is changing rapidly, but that is not a sufficient reason to submit ourselves passively to the disorder of the moment. We must look at the situation from a different perspective. The disorientation created by the sudden change is amplifying the feeling of dissolution more than what reality suggests. Our task is not to resist change, nor to be swept along by it, but to understand it, give it direction, and turn uncertainty into opportunity. The future of engineering will not be defined by the noise of the transition, but by our ability to see through it, identify what truly matters, and continue building what comes next.