After writing well over 100k lines of code with AI this past year, I can tell you the âAI replaces engineersâ crowd is missing the point.
Most hot takes fall into three buckets:
1. The Hype: Selling a narrative.
2. The Trivial: Confusing boilerplate with serious engineering.
3. The Theoretical: Havenât touched a production codebase in years. Forgot that typing was never the bottleneck.
AI executes well inside a frame. But choosing the frame and understanding the architecture are still on us.
The 100k+ lines I wrote werenât scaffolding. They included a custom React reconciler for WebGL and a shared deterministic simulation with optimistic updates. You canât prompt your way through these without understanding the fundamentals. AI didnât design the solution; it gave me leverage to implement it in record time.
After decades in this industry, Iâm calling this the Engineering Singularity: the gap between architectural intent and production has collapsed. A massive undertaking no longer requires the coordination or friction of a traditional studio.
AI is a bus that can take you from Point A to Point B faster. But it will never tell you that youâd be better off going to Point C.
That partâs still ours.