The hidden skills behind the AI engineer

"Artificial intelligence hides more complexity than any technology wave before it. Writing code, wiring APIs, and scaling infrastructure now feel effortless, but that ease conceals an expanding layer of invisible decisions beneath the surface. The hard problems have moved upward, into judgment, coordination, and systems thinking."

"Shawn "Swyx" Wang's 2023 post is widely credited with defining the new concept of the "AI engineer" as someone who effectively applies foundation models via APIs or open-source tools to build, evaluate, and productize AI systems rather than train them."

"Jeff Boudier, product and growth lead at Hugging Face, the open-source platform that underpins much of today's model sharing and evaluation ecosystem, describes this shift as the next great standard in software practice. "Evaluation is the new CI," he told InfoWorld. "The real engineering leverage is not choosing the right model, it is building systems that can continually measure, test, and swap them." Hugging Face has built its platform around that principle. Its Evaluate library standardizes the process of assessing models across hundreds of tasks, while AI Sheets provides a no-code interface for comparing models on custom data sets. Developers can run evaluation workflows on on-demand GPUs through"

Integrating large language models into applications requires new disciplines and techniques beyond traditional coding, APIs, and infrastructure. Hidden complexity has shifted upward into judgment, coordination, and systems thinking rather than low-level implementation. The AI engineer role centers on applying foundation models via APIs or open-source tools to build, evaluate, and productize systems rather than training models. Continuous evaluation, automated measurement, and the ability to swap models are now essential engineering practices. Platforms and tooling that standardize assessment and provide no-code comparison interfaces enable teams to run evaluation workflows and operationalize model selection. Engineers must develop new skills to oversee and integrate model-generated outputs into reliable systems.

Read at InfoWorld