Don't Be Cheap: AI and the Appearance of Engineering

Software engineering has a pattern: demanding practices arrive and get reduced to their ceremonies. Agile kept the standups, lost the discipline. DevOps kept the postmortems, lost the learning. The form survives. The demand disappears. This has happened before, and there's a name for it. AI accelerates the pattern. It generates tests, PRs, architecture notes, and incident summaries without requiring the understanding those artefacts used to demand. The output looks mature. The numbers tell a different story. This talk names the pattern, draws a line between frugal AI use and cheap AI use, and asks what happens to engineers when the demanding work that formed them becomes optional.