Rendered at 21:24:40 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Cloudflare Workers.
simonw 3 hours ago [-]
I like these definitions:
- AI Engineer: an engineer who builds software that makes use of LLMs and other AI models, and maybe trains models (but not required)
- Agentic Engineer: an engineer who makes use of AI tools like coding agents when writing software.
AI Engineer was quite well established in the last few years to that first meaning, mainly thanks to swyx in 2023: https://www.latent.space/p/ai-engineer - which then lead to the popular AI Engineer Summit / World's Fair series of events https://www.ai.engineer/
But this year coding agents have become much more widely spread (the category didn't exist when AI Engineer was coined in 2023), so there's a possibility the term is being redefined to describe people who use those. I think that's a bad redefinition, personally.
("Agentic Engineer" is much less widely used, there may be other names for that category of engineer that I've not encountered yet.)
seattle_spring 2 hours ago [-]
Considering 99% of engineers are using AI tools, that would mean all engineers are now "Agentic Engineers." Are we really no longer putting any value on someone who has expertise in understanding the code it produces?
simonw 2 hours ago [-]
Right, that's why I don't think that class particularly needs a name. It's trending towards "software engineers" now.
We need a name for engineers who don't use coding agents.
gavinray 4 hours ago [-]
I wrote an entire blogpost about this ridiculous phenomenon:
I think "They wanted an engineer to build a chatbox that called ChatGPT with company documents as prompt context" fits the term "AI Engineer", personally - see https://www.latent.space/p/ai-engineer which uses it for "applied"
AI.
gavinray 23 minutes ago [-]
You don't call someone who integrates the Twilio API a "Twilio Engineer", or Mailchimp a "Mailchimp engineer"
Integrating third-party libraries to build an application is a significant chunk of the work in any SaaS product and the expectation is you can read the vendor docs and figure it out
seattle_spring 1 hours ago [-]
Why would a self-described "AI Engineer" be any more capable of building that sort of functionality over any other backend engineer, especially one who is familiar with agent-assisted development?
simonw 58 minutes ago [-]
Because building on top of LLMs is really tricky. You need to understand things like writing evals, configuring agentic loops, creating and iterating on system prompts, designing tools that work well with LLMs.
It's a speciality, just like being a payments engineer who integrates with systems like Stripe is a speciality.
Being familiar with agent-assisted development helps a little bit because at least you understand prompts, but there's a whole lot more to building software on top of LLMs than that.
Any engineer can get familiar with these things of course, just like any engineer can figure out what it takes to work on payment systems.
gavinray 20 minutes ago [-]
> It's a speciality, just like being a payments engineer who integrates with systems like Stripe is a speciality.
At $PREV_JOB, we had physical Point-of-Sales systems as well as a mobile app, and provided multi-merchant marketplace functionality with things like disbursement reports and support for multiple bank accounts for vendors.
I had to migrate all of this from Braintree to Stripe. It probably encompasses the most complex payment system I've worked on in my career.
But that's not a job title, it's just part of "make the app work"
agup792 3 hours ago [-]
The definition is definitely changing.. or the way people are using it. AI PM used to mean something very different than what it does now as well!
- AI Engineer: an engineer who builds software that makes use of LLMs and other AI models, and maybe trains models (but not required)
- Agentic Engineer: an engineer who makes use of AI tools like coding agents when writing software.
AI Engineer was quite well established in the last few years to that first meaning, mainly thanks to swyx in 2023: https://www.latent.space/p/ai-engineer - which then lead to the popular AI Engineer Summit / World's Fair series of events https://www.ai.engineer/
But this year coding agents have become much more widely spread (the category didn't exist when AI Engineer was coined in 2023), so there's a possibility the term is being redefined to describe people who use those. I think that's a bad redefinition, personally.
("Agentic Engineer" is much less widely used, there may be other names for that category of engineer that I've not encountered yet.)
We need a name for engineers who don't use coding agents.
https://gavinray97.github.io/blog/absurdity-of-ai-engineer-t...
Integrating third-party libraries to build an application is a significant chunk of the work in any SaaS product and the expectation is you can read the vendor docs and figure it out
It's a speciality, just like being a payments engineer who integrates with systems like Stripe is a speciality.
Being familiar with agent-assisted development helps a little bit because at least you understand prompts, but there's a whole lot more to building software on top of LLMs than that.
Any engineer can get familiar with these things of course, just like any engineer can figure out what it takes to work on payment systems.
I had to migrate all of this from Braintree to Stripe. It probably encompasses the most complex payment system I've worked on in my career.
But that's not a job title, it's just part of "make the app work"