From Software Engineer to AI Engineer: An Origin Story

by Kristi
project-ideas Generative-AI personal-growth

Recently, I looked at my mom and said, “Mom, I think I want to be an AI Engineer when I grow up.” She smiled and asked, “What does that even mean?” and I said, “I don’t know, but I’m gonna find out!” For context, I’m fully grown with my own house and a healthy appreciation for all my household appliances—not to mention, I have 10 years of software development under my belt. Which, I guess, makes me an adult. Not that I like to acknowledge the distinction.

Where Do I Even Start?

It’s a little overwhelming to think about, and the Almighty Oracle (aka Google) has differing opinions on what an “AI Engineer” even is. Honestly, my overarching goal is to try and understand the landscape a little. What kinds of roles are being developed as AI gets smarter and software products rely on it more? Which of my nascent skills need to be developed to translate well into one of those roles?

I found this blog post that helped me get a general idea of what I’m looking at. Some more internet sleuthing led me to this book: The AI Engineering Bible: The Complete And Up-to-date Guide To Build, Develop, and Scale Production ready AI Systems. I’ve only just started reading it, so I’m not sure if it will be useful yet.

Practical Applications

My early takeaways from these readings are that I should start by just doing stuff with AI. So today I did that. I gave Copilot the task of updating and modernizing the portfolio website I created as a new grad 10 years ago. I have to say, I’m pretty happy with the results. I now have a dev blog! (It’s something I’ve been meaning to start, but I never got around to it.)

Ideas for What’s Next

  • Editing this blog. I’m human. I write in sentence fragments and half thoughts, and I use too many commas—or not enough. I don’t even know.
  • Cleaning up and updating my super old projects with AI. Starting by fixing the things that are broken in their current state, then making updates. I’ll aim to do a blog post for each project I update that tracks my prompts, the responses, and any PR comments so you can see how it goes.
  • Solve a real-world problem by creating an app with AI that incorporates an AI agent in some way.

This post was edited with the help of GitHub Copilot—meta, right?