Engineers are fundamentally pragmatic people. We're problem solvers. Someone who only cares about ingenuity and craft would be a shitty engineer, because that perspective is entirely inward-facing and not directed at the problems at hand. I think this is fundamentally my problem with your question, and I think if you framed the question slightly differently with this in mind, it would make more sense.
To attempt to answer it, I think there are many engineers who care deeply about creativity, ingenuity, and craft, because those are key qualities (among others) needed to solve real-world problems. The question you hinted at is whether LLMs are compatible with that, and I think more people are asking those types of questions now.
Like pretty much everything else about human beings, I expect most of us exist at a point on a spectrum rather than belonging to this type or not.
I think the engineering mindset comes from a place of curiosity. I don't agree that there is anything fundamentally different about the person who chooses to be an engineer versus not, I think everyone just has a different mix of characteristics and preferences.
For me, the act of creation is the compelling part. Sometimes that's writing code, other times it's seeing the fully-formed thing come into being. For the latter, LLMs can certainly help me do more, or at least take care of some of the menial stuff like writing test cases while I do more interesting things like think about strategy/architecture.
Just make sure you're reviewing your LLM's code as if you were a colleague's!
As a professional developer I can say my heart is really in it sometimes and other times it isn't. And as a professional I have to get the job done regardless.
So depending on the day I can very much enjoy the craft or just be glad something is done.
There's an unusual amount of the "ends justify the means" mindset amongst the dev set associated with Silicon Valley these days, particularly in the genAI crowd. Fortunately, it's not nearly as common overall.
"just give me the result" means "just give me A result", never mind whether it is correct. It means "my job is to read the next line of the script, not to notice what the words say".
Engineers are fundamentally pragmatic people. We're problem solvers. Someone who only cares about ingenuity and craft would be a shitty engineer, because that perspective is entirely inward-facing and not directed at the problems at hand. I think this is fundamentally my problem with your question, and I think if you framed the question slightly differently with this in mind, it would make more sense.
To attempt to answer it, I think there are many engineers who care deeply about creativity, ingenuity, and craft, because those are key qualities (among others) needed to solve real-world problems. The question you hinted at is whether LLMs are compatible with that, and I think more people are asking those types of questions now.
Like pretty much everything else about human beings, I expect most of us exist at a point on a spectrum rather than belonging to this type or not.
I think the engineering mindset comes from a place of curiosity. I don't agree that there is anything fundamentally different about the person who chooses to be an engineer versus not, I think everyone just has a different mix of characteristics and preferences.
For me, the act of creation is the compelling part. Sometimes that's writing code, other times it's seeing the fully-formed thing come into being. For the latter, LLMs can certainly help me do more, or at least take care of some of the menial stuff like writing test cases while I do more interesting things like think about strategy/architecture.
Just make sure you're reviewing your LLM's code as if you were a colleague's!
As a professional developer I can say my heart is really in it sometimes and other times it isn't. And as a professional I have to get the job done regardless.
So depending on the day I can very much enjoy the craft or just be glad something is done.
There's an unusual amount of the "ends justify the means" mindset amongst the dev set associated with Silicon Valley these days, particularly in the genAI crowd. Fortunately, it's not nearly as common overall.
"just give me the result" means "just give me A result", never mind whether it is correct. It means "my job is to read the next line of the script, not to notice what the words say".