Programming Is Real Engineering, and AI Proves It

Engineering is not just about the tests. It is also about following standards, making decisions based on data and requirements not just personal preferences or trends, and especially being aware of the legal and ethical implications of what you're building.

That's why there is so much emphasis on signing or stamping projects in the "ordinary" engineering world: you're literally telling a potential third party (which may include a court of law at some point) that you reviewed the work and can be held responsible.

This doesn't rule out team work of course (just think about civil engineering, it's not something you can do alone most of the times), and this doesn't mean there are no unethical or even corrupt engineers, but there is in most cases a single person who is responsible from a professional, ethical, and legal point of view.

In my experience this never occurs with programming unless you're dealing with SWE in engineering-adjacent sectors (aerospace, ...), and even then I'm not sure as I have no personal experience in those areas.

It doesn't prove any such thing. The rapid iteration allowed by software being an insubstantial mathematical construct resulted in coders munging libraries and frameworks into a runnable hack which they then shipped. It doesn't require much planning or engineering to just drunkenly stumble^W^Witerate their way to something that kinda, sorta works, like Monty Python's "...,The third castle burned down, fell over, then sank into the swamp. But the fourth one, that one stayed up!" skit. That is how we got to the dire state of existing software. LLM and particularly agentic coding just mechanizes and accelerates these poor practices.

I am confused. Does the article say "The fact that AI can write code proves that programming is real engineering"?

AI can generate poems too, does it prove that poetry is engineering, too?