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This is the danger of isolating engineering from customers, or even internal customer-interfacing employees.

If all they see is code, they will get satisfaction from tidy code, not user happiness. One good thing about AI is it elevates product engineers because they more directly bridge the customer-product-code divide.

That's my take as well... the dev effectively takes on QA/QC and PM roles as a team working with AI for the baseline of development work. Of course, this is also a slightly different skill set and cognitive load. It also needs to completely upend how project planning happens when you are using Dev+AI in coordination.
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Not just isolating them from customers but also from engineering-adjacent work that isn't code.

I've been at a place that is basically microservices slop (several dozen services per engineer). They're all poorly maintained and at least a solid 40% of all this code that they've written could have been just a traefik or nginx configuration/container.

When you have a lot of inexperienced (relative to industry) and overworked software engineers, the solution to every problem becomes to write code and writing new code should be a last resort.

Worse still, there's just a poor general understanding of the internet protocols they're working with and of how to do distributed systems right. Unfortunately with LLMs I've been seeing this get worse, not better.

They use the LLMs for code generation but not architecture review. Bad ideas are getting fully-baked quickly before anyone with good sense can intervene.