Don’t Be Cheap: AI and the Appearance of Engineering
Software engineering has a pattern: demanding practices arrive and get reduced to their ceremonies. Agile kept the standups, lost the discipline. DevOps kept the postmortems, lost the learning. The form survives. The demand disappears. This has happened before, and there’s a name for it. AI accelerates the pattern. It generates tests, PRs, architecture notes, and incident summaries without requiring the understanding those artefacts used to demand. The output looks mature. The numbers tell a different story. This talk names the pattern, draws a line between frugal AI use and cheap AI use, and asks what happens to engineers when the demanding work that formed them becomes optional.
Birger Halfmeier
Birger works with hundreds of engineering teams on cloud architecture and has developed an unfortunate habit of noticing patterns people were hoping to classify as isolated incidents. He has been building software professionally since 2004, which means he remembers when Agile was still demanding, pair programming involved two humans, and “digital transformation” had not yet absorbed every noun in the building. He may be the only speaker today trying to explain AI engineering through a 1940s essay on stupidity. He previously argued that frugality is not the same as being cheap. He has since discovered what is.