The article explores the definition of an engineer and what engineering truly entails, especially in the context of advancing AI technology. It emphasizes that engineering is about taking the right actions in the right sequence to achieve various intentions, highlighting the importance of clarity in project goals and the art of sequencing tasks.

• An engineer is defined as someone who takes the right actions in the right sequence to achieve a set of intentions, not someone who builds physical things—making software engineers legitimately engineers.
• Engineering projects have multiple simultaneous intentions (resources, stakeholders, users), and failing to articulate them causes teams to build the wrong product or misalign with goals.
• Sequencing matters as much as choosing the right actions—order of operations determines success, and sequences nest recursively within larger sequences (illustrated via the hand-washing example).