What Remains for the Engineer When AI Writes Code, Queries, and Technical Texts
AI automates the production of many technical artifacts, but it does not take over the engineering function as a whole. The engineer still defines the goal and requirements, chooses the computational mechanism, specifies admissible states and constraints, evaluates the consequences of failure, assembles evidence of correctness, and is accountable for integration and operation. The delegation boundary does not run between “simple” and “complex” tasks, but between results that can be independently verified and safely rolled back, and decisions where an error is hard to observe, spreads widely, or is expensive.