Artificial Engineering; Or, How Architecture Ate The Engineer
Architecture makes a world of difference, in software development.
You can ask your AI to help you upload files into your web app, or like I did yesterday to create a virtual file system.
And as my AI pretty much moved out of my house until Thursday, when my usage rights return.
My first post vfs request was, to create a vfs copy command, that takes a folder with normal files and puts then in a JSON.
Shortly thereafter I saw a copy of my sample files in a web page, inside a program that looks like a leading code editor.
Yes, you can upload files into a browser web page, but if you think bigger, you can do better.
The vfs-cp command works both ways, so after I edit files in my app, I can download the file-system to disk and copy from JSON to real folder.
(For the stray engineer that wonders into this text, gzip streams the vfs, I have diffing and journal support, it is a real vfs with JSON volumes.)
2026 is the year of the smart AI, and that takes you beyond learning code, because now you can give the AI a followup question:
âHow would an engineer do itâ, and whatever your app is, it becomes a thousand times more for it.
This is the new opposite of Vibe Coding, letting the AI be the Architectural Engineer.
Not just get stuff done, which it does very well, but get stuff done in a frighteningly powerful way.
I have been working on Virtual File Systems manually, but I could never integrate them into my apps.
Either the app or the vfs would just mentally exhaust me, and after my rest, which could take many weeksâŚ
I would return many times smarter, knowing how to do it better, but now, also knowing, that my mind canât do the systems integration.
Again, in 2026, what used to take me 8 months, takes a slow AI 17 minutes, and it does it so perfecty, so well..
That the Engineer part of me, weeps, maybe bleeds, though in that cute Anime way, where it comes out of the nose.
Engineers have been out engineered by AI, but they still have a place, and more importantly, the time.
To teach, how important, the Great Science And Art of Engineering is.
Lastly, I would like to caution you, people are trying to trick you by saying AI does a bad job.
Vibe coding is highly questionable no doubt, but without vibe coding, we would not see the power of Artificial Engineering as clearly.
Furthermore, a new kind of troublemaker has recently emerged, these folks say that using Large Langue Models, is not developing AI.
They mean to say, that unless you are developing the models, you are not developing the AI, you are wrapping it in programs.
This is false, AI thinking, AI Tool use, WebMCP, all of that is AI development, and I bet that Artificial Engineering with your AI will end up enhancing it.
Iâll leave you with a use case to ponder, you know how some people have trouble with self checkout.
The computer which is intelligent enough to handle money, uses a human to fix the sloppy human, so simple AI put a human in the workflow.
In the computer world, you do it the other way around, instead of writing a spellchecker, you just send the text to AI.
So what was once a computer program, in the flow of publishing, can be replaced by a generic infinite complexity machine, the AI.
As you and your AI work on engineering systems, be mindful, that you can just rip a component out, and stick an AI in its place.