> Whether this understanding of engineering, which is correct for some projects, is correct for engineering as a whole is questionable. Very few programs ever reach the point that they are heavily used and long-lived. Almost everything has few users, or is short-lived, or both. Let’s not extrapolate from the experiences of engineers who only take jobs maintaining large existing products to the entire industry.

I see this kind of retort more and more and I'm increasingly puzzled by it. What is the sector of software engineering where we don't care if the thing you create works or that it may do something harmful? This feels like an incoherent generalization of startup logic about creating quick/throwaway code to release early. Building something that doesn't work or building it without caring about the extent to which it might harm our users is not something engineers (or users) want. I don't see any scenario in which we'd not want to carefully scrutinize software created by an agent.