The Middle Loop – Annie Vella

That’s why the first research question I wanted to answer as part of my Masters of Engineering at the University of Auckland, supervised by Kelly Blincoe, was about task focus. Are AI tools shifting where engineers actually spend their time and effort? Because if they are, they’re implicitly shifting what skills we practice and, ultimately, the definition of the role itself.

Ok so engineers are spending less time writing code, no surprise there. But the standard assumption, that freed-up time flows upstream into design and architecture, didn’t hold. Time compressed across almost all six tasks, including design. Rather than trading writing time for design time, engineers reported spending less time on nearly everything.

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