Fragments: March 16

Annie Vella did some research into how 158 professional software engineers used AI, her first question was: Are AI tools shifting where engineers actually spend their time and effort? Because if they are, they’re implicitly shifting what skills we practice and, ultimately, the definition of the role itself. She found that participants saw a shift from creation-oriented tasks to verification-oriented tasks, but it was a different form of verification than reviewing and testing. In my thesis, I propose a name for it: supervisory engineering work - the effort required to direct AI, evaluate its output, and correct it when it’s wrong. Many software folks think of inner and outer loops. The inner loop is writing code, testing, debugging. The outer loop is commit, review, CI/CD, deploy, observe. What if supervisory engineering work lives in a new loop between these two loops? AI is increasingly automating the inner loop - the code generation, the build-test cycle, the debugging. But someone