The AI Engineer Illusion: Why Calling LLM APIs Is Not Enough

The AI Engineer Illusion: Why Calling LLM APIs Is Not Enough Three engineers interviewed for the same role last month. One had 5 years of Node.js and spent 6 months calling OpenAI APIs. One had ML fundamentals and shipped two RAG pipelines to production. One had built and evaluated a multi-agent system — with observability, evals, and drift monitoring in place. All three called themselves AI Engineers. Only one actually was. And the industry has no consensus on which one. Job boards are flooded