Ep 136: How AI is changing what software engineering means, with Brian Parks

Barclay and Ian are joined by Brian Parks of Synapse Software, who spent twenty years as a software engineer, three of them at Cherwell, and now runs a business archiving ITSM data for organisations coming off platforms that no longer exist.

Brian still calls himself a software engineer while admitting he barely writes code, which opens up a longer conversation about what the job has become. His team leans on AI for the boilerplate, the database layer, the API endpoints, the first version of a UI. Vibe coding, in his view, is something else entirely and shouldn't be confused with engineering. What he's found is that the time freed up goes into requirements, testing and validation, all the things he says he should have been doing more of anyway.

On AI initiatives, his warning is about data. Foundation models handle general questions well, but organisations asking AI to work with their own knowledge base need that knowledge base to be good. He also makes a case for retiring the word generative in favour of synthesising, on the basis that nothing is being invented from nothing.

Barclay raises the environmental cost, and Brian, who lives in a farming community, has strong views on data centres being built on farmland. It goes into sustainability, whether the green movement has reached AI at all, and the fact that nobody can properly account for the cost of training a model. Ian brings in Ford rehiring hundreds of senior engineers after replacing them with AI and recalling vehicles as a result.

Trivia this week involves Doom running on a display made of E. coli cells, at roughly 599 years per playthrough. Barclay's camera also gave up, so he spends the episode as a voice.

Watch the full conversation below.