I like the premise that engineers are “lazy”, understanding that it’s very much a virtue and compliment when used appropriately. From Bryan Cantrill’s “The peril of laziness lost”:

We undertake the hard intellectual work of developing these abstractions in part because we are optimizing the hypothetical time of our future selves, even if at the expense of our current one. When we get this calculus right, it is glorious, as the abstraction serves not just ourselves, but all who come after us. That is, our laziness serves to make software easier to write, and systems easier to compose — to allow more people to write more of it.

The problem is of course the ever-present misguided brogrammer, especially in the age of AI, who confuses virtuous laziness with mass shitting out of code. Prime example: Gary Tan stupidly bragging about how many lines of code he generated. Predictably, none of what he generated makes any sense or is by any definition good:

Polish software engineer Gregorein, however, took it apart, and the results are at once predictable, hilarious and instructive: A single load of Tan’s “newsletter-blog-thingy” included multiple test harnesses (!), the Hello World Rails app (?!), a stowaway text editor, and then eight different variants of the same logo — one of which with zero bytes.