DeepSeek Engineer Says Goodbye to Hand-Writing Code as AI Masters the Craft in One Year

Liu Shengyu, the lead engineer for DeepSeek v4.1's main Attention operator, recently published an article titled 'I Had to Bury My Talent in Yesterday,' which drew widespread attention. The post received over 100,000 reads on WeChat, topped Zhihu's trending list, and sparked discussions on X.

Liu said AI has advanced rapidly in operator design. Within a year, it went from a small assistant that could only look up docs and read code to an 'operator master' capable of independently reading CUDA, PTX, and SASS code and optimizing operators. He expects that in six months to a year, AI-written operators will match or surpass his own work.

He admitted that even knowing optimizing operators accelerates model progress and his own replacement, he still chooses to do his best. Writing operators brings him great joy, and even if he slacked off, other companies' models would keep advancing.

Liu believes he won't lose his job but must change careers. He trusts frontier intelligence should be open and cheap for everyone, which is why he stays at DeepSeek. He clarified the article isn't about job anxiety but about saying goodbye to hand-writing operators, and the views are his own.