I'm finding I can put my ops background fully to work, designing far more complex and performant architectures that require big lifts, without worrying about how much my fingers are going to hurt and that it'll take 8 months to even prove if it works.

Always has been as an electronics engineer. I always loved designing and building the circuits, but when the PCB came back from the assembly house with a microprocessor in it, that is usually where the grunt work started. As a contractor I see a lot of different microprocessors and architectures, and just being good at C is not enough as you need to know all the register layouts, idiosyncrasies, and how all the peripherals are configured and work. AI has at least been a godsend here as it can condense 1000's of pages of datasheets and erratas into a working example in a few seconds, so writing my test suites or firmware no longer takes forever and I can get on with the good bits :-)

This is a quote from the concluding paragraphs of https://obie.medium.com/what-happens-when-the-coding-becomes...

Nice to read this take on AI, especially on HN.

I read on HN a lot of anecdotes of people who find less joy in work because AI is taking the fun out of it, or that it is relacing part if their job.

For me it feels different. Finally i have a 'coworker' who doesn't get annoyed after asking tons of questions and details.

One that mostly understands where I am getting at, even if the question is poorly formulated.

One that comes up with ideas that make the result better. One that summarizes what i've told it, so I can check whether it got what I meant.

One that has more knowledge than any living person.

Still it is being criticized for hallucinating and for producing imperfect results. But maybe that's what keeps the job interesting as a SW engineer, the provided solution is not perfect and you can improve it together step by step.

The AI was trained to come across as a real person. It's easy to fall into the trap of not seeing it just as it is: a very complex tool. However if you have enough experience, you feel the difference. Its being overly confident shines true.