One of the most thrilling, albeit scary, things about software engineering as a field is how quickly it evolves. New technology balloons out of nowhere and if you are not paying attention, it might be a needed skill for your next job.
However, as we develop better and better technologies, one can not help but notice how "easy" it has become to "engineer" software. From the early days of writing assembly to todays prompting, seemingly much of the reigns that we proudly once had on our skills as programmers is starting to loosen. Software engineers of old used to meticulously comb through their projects for any amount of memory saving ensuring that their programs runs on the little RAM whatever computer had. Today, anyone can simply ask AI to make their application for them and in a few short moments receive a, hopefully, working product. There are even jokes online of people prompting their AI agent, then go out to coffee and shopping to then return home to see what their little digital programmer has done. The passion that once was there for optimizations and clever use of mathematics is now replaced with vision and desire for reaching the final end product as fast as possible.
The other day, I was visiting my parents whom are teachers, and helped them prepare their classrooms for the next school year. This year, my mother is in charge of science, and in the back of the classroom were scales. Not digital scales, but the ones where you have to adjust the weights to find where there is balance - that is where you know what the weight is of what you are measuring. For todays standards, it is quite primitive. However, it did get me thinking. Playing around with the scale, adding or removing weight to find that perfect balance... it reminds me of what we may actually be doing in software.
