Metadata
- Author: David Jayatillake from davidj.substack
- Full Title:: AI Generalism
- Category:: 🗞️Articles
- Document Tags:: Data Team Roles,
- Read date:: 2025-04-04
Highlights
Let’s take a look at AI Engineering. Is it like ML engineering? Not really… and it’s probably less like ML Engineering than Data Engineering or Analytics Engineering. There is very little overlap in the work that needs to be done in AI Engineering and ML Engineering. There aren’t parallels in tooling, such as between feature stores and semantic layers. AI Engineering is much more similar to full stack or backend software engineering. Whereas these kinds of software engineering are often centred around a database and providing an application with interfaces around the database, AI Engineering is centred around the LLM. You make prompts instead of queries. You have MCPs and RAG instead of ORMs. (View Highlight)
I would take a full-stack software engineer to work on an AI project any day over an ML engineer². (View Highlight)