> With LLMs, only the "best" engineers will survive, because nobody needs mediocre engineers anymore.

LLMs are going to show that there's a huge divide in "engineers" between people who love "coding" and people who like "engineering".

The group of people kicking and screaming the most are the people who love code and don't want to see their coding go away.

These are typically the build vs buy folks. "We can't use anything anyone else wrote, I can do it better..."

What do you think Staff level engineers do? They don't sit around coding all day.

Writing the code is just something you had to do in the past to get the job done.

What you get paid to do is "engineer". The two are related, but they are separate. Coding is a very small part of the average engineer's job (and almost none at staff level and above).

And yet the vast majority of engineers think that the world is going to end if they aren't spending most of their time "coding".

Very well said and if you look at some of the other threads on hacker news about why people don’t like AI it specifically because they like typing and coding

The majority of my time is an engineering manager has been teaching “engineers” how to actually do engineering with any kind of rigor

The number of engineers who have an absolutely no theoretical structural or system basis for what they’re doing is the vast vast majority