Tools: Curiosity Doesn’t Kill the Engineer

It Gives Them Nine More Lives in the Age of AI “Curiosity killed the cat” is a warning. In engineering, it is survival. And in the age of AI, it may be the single trait that keeps us relevant. AI can autocomplete code. It can scaffold services. It can generate infrastructure templates, tests, and even architectural diagrams.
But AI is trained on patterns. Curiosity questions patterns.
That difference matters. The engineer who stops at “it works” will slowly be replaced by systems that can also make things “work.” The engineer who asks “why the queue saturates at this load”, “what the true bottleneck is”, “what assumption an abstraction is hiding”, and “what happens when the model is wrong” cannot be easily replaced. Curiosity operates below the surface layer where AI is strongest. Every Deep Question Is an Extra Life When you trace a request from the load balancer to the kernel to userspace and back, you gain a life.
When you understand how WAL durability interacts with fsync semantics, you gain another.
When you read the consensus paper instead of just using the library, that’s another.
And another life when you model throughput using queueing theory instead of guessing,
These are not just technical wins. They are resilience wins. AI can produce solutions. Curious engineers understand trade-offs.
AI can refactor code. Curious engineers understand failure modes.
AI can summarise documentation. Curious engineers build mental models.
Mental models compound. The Real Threat Is Complacency The danger is not that AI will replace engineers.
The danger is that engineers will outsource their curiosity.
If we let tools think for us, abstractions become opaque walls instead of glass windows. We become operators of systems we do not understand.
The curious engineer uses AI differently.
Not as a crutch but as a multiplier.
They ask better questions.
They interrogate outputs.
They test assumptions.
They dive into edge cases that the model glosses over.
Curiosity turns AI from a replacement into an amplifier. Curiosity Makes You Antifragile
When production fails, the incurious engineer searches for a quick answer.
The curious one traces signals.
Why did the replication lag spike?
Why did tail latency explode?
What is the queue discipline actually doing?
Is this a coordination limit or a physical limit?
Each failure becomes another life added to the stack.
Over time, systems stop looking like random collections of tools. They start revealing deeper patterns.
Entropy and compression.
Backpressure and channel capacity.
Cache hierarchies and storage engines.
Scheduling theory and latency.
Once you see principles instead of products, you cannot be easily automated away.
AI predicts tokens.
Engineers reason about constraints. Nine Lives in the AI Era Technologies will change.
Frameworks will expire.
AI models will improve.
But the engineer who remains relentlessly curious about fundamentals, failure, and first principles keeps regenerating.
Each layer of understanding is another life.
In an era where automation accelerates everything, the only durable edge is the willingness to keep asking ‘why?’ long after others have stopped. Curiosity will not kill the engineer.
It will give them nine more lives.
And it may be exactly how we survive. Opeyemi Folorunsho leads the Research & Development team at Moniepoint. Templates let you quickly answer FAQs or store snippets for re-use. Are you sure you want to hide this comment? It will become hidden in your post, but will still be visible via the comment's permalink. Hide child comments as well For further actions, you may consider blocking this person and/or reporting abuse