AI Coding Assistants Are Reshaping Engineering — Not Replacing Engineers

IntelliSense was one of Microsoft’s early innovations in coding assistance, first introduced in Visual Basic 5.0 (1996) and later expanded in Visual Studio 97. It helped autocomplete objects — for example, if you had an object called a steering wheel, it would suggest relevant properties and methods, saving developers from constantly looking up documentation.

The programming language, the object, and the IDE all worked together, so the programmer didn’t have to think as much about the syntax. It just completed as expected. This was way…