The Double Life of a Cyborg Engineer
We live in transitional times for intellectual work in general, and engineering in particular. There is a lot of hype around LLMs these days — inflated expectations, widespread confusion about what they are, what they can actually do for you, what they mean for the future of thinking for a living. And there is concern, some of it legitimate: the environmental cost of the technology, the electricity bills it drives up, the job displacement it will — supposedly inevitably — bring about.
All of this is understandable. But underneath the noise sits something else, something far more interesting — compelling, even — from where a cyborg engineer stands. Fear. Engineers — my own people, the ones I live and work among — are scared shitless of AI in general, and of LLMs specifically.
Afraid of what, exactly? That skills earned over years of nights and weekends are about to become immaterial. That the status those skills confer is about to evaporate — engineers, whatever they say in public, privately rank themselves as the most intelligent life form on the planet. That the job itself will go: taken by the machine, or worse, by the colleague who learned to steer one.
Fear, when it finds no better outlet, reaches for the most human response of them all: refusal, closure, violence. The threatened tribe closes its ranks and defends its turf tooth and nail. No one from the other tribe is accepted, no deviation from the dogma is tolerated: those-who-use-LLMs-are-wimps-who-don’t-know-any-better.
How would I know this? Plainly put, I managed to infiltrate them. Hidden in plain sight, I watch the culture reproduce itself on a daily basis. Candidates — prospective newcomers to the tribe — are evaluated strictly on their “own” skills. AI augmentation is frowned upon when it is not refused outright, on the strength of one unexamined axiom: working with AI is cheating.
Which is like asking a horseman to ride fifty miles on foot. Like asking a truck driver to carry a couple of tonnes of cargo on his own shoulders — and mocking him when he declines. Like asking a pilot to fly on his own wings, a modern-day Icarus, and calling the aircraft a crutch.
I remember an interview process where the standing recommendation was to get cracking on leetcode. So I did. Two weeks, overstressed, studying day and night, powering through hundreds of puzzles to make myself good enough. And I did pass the damn interview. Maybe not with flying colors, but good enough. You know how many times I have looked at leetcode since? Zero. Those skills have no resemblance whatsoever to the work we actually need to do, and I am fairly sure none of my coworkers touches a leet puzzle either, except maybe out of a personal fondness for puzzles. That is the tell: the initiation rite does not measure the work. It measures purity.
And here is where irony curdles into farce. The very culture that polices “cheating” at the door is perfectly at peace with an untested codebase. With direct pushes to main — merge requests are for sissies, real men push. With production databases that have no backups. No. Seriously. Production. No backups. And the list could go on and on.
The gate was never about quality. It has always been about identity.
Recently a parallel popped into my head, and it refuses to leave. This culture feels like the 1970s — the machismo, the dogma, and the people who did not fit leading double lives. Gay people stayed in the closet not out of shame but out of accuracy: they read the hostility of the society around them correctly, and they protected themselves, even at the cost of living a lie. Let me be careful with the analogy — I am not claiming the stakes are comparable; nobody gets beaten — or worse — in an alley for using a language model. But the mechanism rhymes: conceal what you are, pass as what you are not, and split your life in two. Don’t ask. Don’t tell.
Because that is exactly what is happening. I know engineers — good ones — who work with LLMs every day and hide it. Who prompt in a private window and answer in the standup as if the insight arrived by pure introspection. Who retype the machine’s output in their own hand so the diff looks artisanal. Who take sole credit not out of vanity but out of self-defense. They lead double lives, and their closet has a terminal in it.
If history repeats itself, liberation for the cyborg engineers will come to pass at some point. Closets only hold as long as everyone inside believes they are alone — that is the one lesson worth taking from that earlier, harder struggle.
Until then, it is just a shame that humans as a species prove, over and over again, to be so disappointing. One half of me takes that personally. The other holds the tiller.