> ... nobody in the field of "Software Engineering" is actually an Engineer if we go by a strict definitions.

This is a pet peeve of mine, so while I understand what you mean, I will challenge you to come up with a strict definition that excludes software engineering!

And since I've had this discussion before, I'll pre-emptively hazard a guess that the argument boils down to "rigor", and point out that a) economic feasibility is a key part of engineering, b) the level of rigor applied to any project is a function of economics, and c) the economics of software projects is a very wide range.

Put another way, statistically most devs work on projects where the blast radius of failure is some minor inconvenience to like, 5 users. We really don't need rigor there, so I can see where you're coming from. But on the other extreme like aviation software, an appropriately extreme level of rigor is applied.

Engineers are accredited in the US too. But there is an "industrial exemption" that allows you to work as an engineer without a license for certain kinds of employers. You just can't offer engineering services to the public without a license. This is more important in some fields than in others.

Where I work, there are plenty of non licensed engineers, but we pay a 3rd party agency for regulatory approval. The people who work for that agency are licensed engineers. Their expertise is knowing the regulations backwards and forwards.

Here's what I think is happening within industry. More and more work done by people with engineering job titles consists of organizing and arranging things, fitting things together, troubleshooting, dealing with vendors, etc. The reason is the complexity of products. As the number of "things" in a product increases by O(n), the number of relationships increases by O(n^2), so the majority of work has to do with relationships. A small fraction of engineers engages in traditional quantitative engineering. In my observation, the average age of those people is around 60, with a few in their 70s.

as an actual engineer i just feel sad. i should probably feel happy but i like solving problems. fml i have becomea luddite.

i think you accidentally overlooked accredited engineers who happen to be writing software

Local AI models are already more than capable enough writing code that surpasses the ability of any bad or even mediocre engineer. That is not something we need to worry about.

In a way, this is less of a cost issue than the fact that some/many engineers do not seem to be willing or able to host things themselves anymore and will happily outsource every part of their stack to managed services, be it CDN, hosting, databases, etc. I don't know why that's not more alarming than the LLMs.

It should probably be "would initially struggle to be as efficient without them."

This is not a binary.

Self hosting at a reasonable scale is much cheaper than people think. I am running clusters of DGX Spark machines with BiFrost load balancers in our company and for client projects. They work flawlessly!

128 GB unified memory, Nvidia chip and ARM CPU for just around 3k€ net. They easily push ~400 input and ~100 output tokens per second per device on say gpt-oss-120b. With two devices in a cluster, thats enough performance for >20 concurrent RAG users or >3 "AI augmented" developers.

And they don't even pull that much power.

Slack, GitHub, Figma, AWS, etc

Lots of people use firebase, supabase etc.

Many people's jobs are centered around using Salesforce

It all makes me uncomfortable- I want to be able to work without internet. But it's getting more difficult to do it

> IDEs are free. Libraries are free. Languages are free. This is becoming more like an internet subscription where you’re at the mercy of Anthropic the same way you may be at the mercy of Comcast.

Ollama/llamafile/vllm/llama.cpp are free. Qwen/kimi/deepseek are free. Pi.dev/OpenCode are free. If you're using a SaaS AI subscription that's fine, but that's hardly the only option.

Not all IDEs are free. Not all LLMs are subscriptions.