[HN Gopher] AI is making junior devs useless
___________________________________________________________________
AI is making junior devs useless
Author : beabetterdev
Score : 134 points
Date : 2026-03-01 13:49 UTC (9 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (beabetterdev.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (beabetterdev.com)
| slibhb wrote:
| I think this concern is overblown. AI is an incredible teaching
| tool. It's probably better for teaching/explaining than for
| writing code. This will make the next generation of junior devs
| far more effective than previous generations. Not because they're
| skipping the fundamentals...because they have a better grasp of
| the fundamentals due to back-and-forth with infinitely patient AI
| teachers.
| dangus wrote:
| I do agree it's a great tool, so much better than trying to
| hope and pray someone on the internet can help you with "I
| don't understand this line of code."
|
| However, it's got a lot of downsides too.
| DJBunnies wrote:
| Not in my experience. They just regurgitate code, and juniors
| don't know if/why it's good or bad and consequently can't field
| questions on their PR.
|
| "It's what the LLM said." - Great. Now go learn it and do it
| again yourself.
| danielbln wrote:
| I always say "own the output". No need to do it by hand but
| you better damn well research _why_ the AI chose a solution,
| and what alternatives there are and why not something else,
| how it works and so on. Ask the AI, ask a seperate
| agent/model, Google for it, I don't care, but "I don't know
| the LLM told me" is not acceptable.
| tpmoney wrote:
| Unless your company is investing in actually teaching your
| junior devs, this isn't really all that different than the
| days when jr devs just copied and pasted something out of
| stack overflow, or blindly copied entire class files around
| just to change 1 line in what could otherwise have been a
| shared method. And if your company is actually investing time
| and resources into teaching your junior devs, then whether
| they're copying and pasting from stack overflow, from another
| file in the project or from AI doesn't really matter.
|
| In my experience it is the very rare junior dev that can
| learn what's good or bad about a given design on their own.
| Either they needed to be paired with a sr dev to look at
| things and explain why they might not want to something a
| given way, or they needed to wind up having to fix the mess
| they made when their code breaks something. AI doesn't change
| that.
| HDThoreaun wrote:
| This just means you have bad juniors who aren't interested in
| learning.
| slibhb wrote:
| For me, the hardest part of software development was learning
| incantations. These are not interesting, they're conventions
| that you have to learn to get stuff to work. AI makes this
| process easier.
|
| If people use AI to generate code they don't understand, that
| will bite them. But it's an incredibly tool for explaining
| code and teaching you boring, rote incantations.
| techpression wrote:
| Only for people who wants be taught, this argument keeps coming
| up again and again but people in general doesn't want to learn
| how to fish, they want the fish on a plate ready to eat, so
| that they can continue scrolling. I see this a lot in juniors,
| they are solution seekers, not problem solvers, and AI makes
| this difference a lot worse.
| croes wrote:
| A teacher who just gives you the solution isn't a good teacher.
|
| You can use AI as a teacher but how many will do that?
| jatari wrote:
| Highly motivated people will use whatever tools they have to
| get better at something, whether they have a textbook, the
| internet or a LLM to use.
|
| The skill of the very top programmers will continue to
| increase with the advent of new tools.
| croes wrote:
| And how many will not? For mist people it's just a job to
| get money, they will put exactly as much effort in it as is
| necessary to produce an acceptable result
| veryemartguy wrote:
| This is the dumbest thought that proliferates this website.
|
| Super great that it's used to pump out tons of code because
| upper management wants features released even faster than
| before. I'm sure the junior devs who don't know a for loop from
| their ass will be able to learn and understand wtf Claude is
| shitting out
| TacticalCoder wrote:
| > AI is an incredible teaching tool. It's probably better for
| teaching/explaining than for writing code.
|
| It is but how do you teach to people who think their new
| profession is being a "senior prompt engineer" (with 4 months
| of experience) and who believe that in 12 months there won't be
| any programmer left?
| Thanemate wrote:
| >AI is an incredible teaching tool.
|
| As a junior, my top issue is finding valuable learning material
| that isn't full of poor or outright wrong information.
|
| In the best and most generous interpretation of your statement,
| LLM's simply removed my need to search for the information.
| That doesn't mean it's not of poor quality or outright wrong.
| ndriscoll wrote:
| I suspect that the quality is ironically correlated with the
| expertise of the user (i.e. it is knowledgeable if you are
| knowledgeable), which puts you in a conundrum (I can report
| that with a couple decades of experience, LLMs are giving me
| high quality, correct results, but I can already see that it
| somehow doesn't work as well for some of my less experienced
| colleagues. A lot of what I've been doing over the last
| couple months is trying to find how to make it "just work"
| for them.).
|
| As a general principle, take advantage of the fact that it
| can easily generate stuff. If you don't know whether
| something is true, have it prove it. Make a
| PoC/test/benchmark to demonstrate what it's saying. Have it
| pull metrics that you have access to. Add more observability.
| Create feedback loops (or rather, ask it to create feedback
| loops). They're very good at reasoning given access to the
| ground truth, so give them more ability to ground themselves.
|
| They also have fantastic knowledge of public things, but no
| knowledge of your company, so your instructions should mostly
| be documentation of what's unique to your company. If it can
| write an instruction on its own (e.g. how to use git or
| kubernetes), it is a useless instruction; it already knows
| that. What it doesn't know is e.g. _where_ your git server
| is. It also doesn 't know what matters to your company: are
| you a startup trying to find product market fit? Are you an
| established company that is not allowed to break customer
| setups? etc. You might even be able to ask it what kinds of
| questions a senior might ask about how a company/team works
| when coming into a new job, and then see if you can answer
| those questions (or find someone who can). In fact, go ask
| chatgpt:
|
| > What are some questions a senior engineer might ask when
| coming into a new role to make themselves more effective?
|
| > What are some questions a principle engineer might ask when
| coming into a new role to make themselves more effective?
|
| > What are some questions an engineering manager might ask
| when coming into a new role to make themselves more
| effective?
|
| > What are some questions an engineering director might ask
| when coming into a new role to make themselves more
| effective?
| koonsolo wrote:
| Here's a tip from an old timer: read the official docs.
|
| I work a lot with juniors, and they all seem to prefer
| watching video's. But videos in my opinion are a slow way to
| gain superficial knowledge.
|
| Do it the hard way and read the official docs, it will be
| your superpower. Go fast over the easy parts, go slow over
| the hard parts, it's that simple.
| kgeist wrote:
| Research [0] from Anthropic about juniors learning to code with
| AI/without:
|
| >the AI group averaged 50% on the quiz, compared to 67% in the
| hand-coding group
|
| And why would they do better? There's less incentive to learn
| because it's so easy to offload thinking to AI.
|
| [0] https://www.anthropic.com/research/AI-assistance-coding-
| skil...
| gamblor956 wrote:
| Objectively speaking, students that use AI score more than a
| full grade point below their peers not using AI.
|
| AI makes students dumber, not smarter.
| dangus wrote:
| This is going to be music to deaf ears.
|
| Companies will continue to demand it (I know people working at
| companies that are literally looking at AI usage as an individual
| performance metric, _puke emoji_ ), and probably 95% of humans
| using pretty understandable human logic aren't going to work
| harder than they need to on purpose.
|
| I wish I had a solution. I think the jury is still out on whether
| programming will be a dead profession in a short number of years,
| replaced by technical protect operators.
| esafak wrote:
| Junior devs: you have an oracle you can pester incessantly. Make
| the most of it so you can learn to detect its mistakes, know when
| to push back, and what to ask of it. That's when you are in the
| clear. Juniors who merely parrot the LLM get fired.
| sarchertech wrote:
| It's gonna take a long time for that to become the norm I
| think. I really wish I could take 5 years off while everyone
| figures this out.
| wreath wrote:
| You don't have to take 5 years off for it. Just continue same
| old business (assuming you don't have outside pressure to use
| this slop-machine) and keep your skills and judgment sharp
| until the tools and workflow stabilizes, and most of all, the
| money to fuel this hype runs out.
| sarchertech wrote:
| The reason I say that is because I don't want to deal with
| trying to keep things from collapsing around me while
| people slam in tens of thousands of lines of vibe coded
| slop.
| verdverm wrote:
| This is good advice for seniors too.
|
| Eg. When using Ai Deep Research for hard to debug issues, asking
| for the why makes for a much better response.
| moritonal wrote:
| When I started my career I heard people say almost verbatim
| "Stack overflow is making junior devs useless", with the idea all
| we did was copypaste scripts over. The same people failed, and
| the same people who can use the tools will succeed now.
| 52-6F-62 wrote:
| I'm not sure sure.
|
| I worked under people who started as juniors that way but were
| politically savvy. Or just ruthless. And pushed their way to
| the top by stealing projects, lying through their teeth, and
| other such tactics.
|
| They were slowing down progress because their methods involved
| sabotaging the progress of others because it might make their
| own contributions shine a little less.
|
| They were the cause of using libraries like leftPad all through
| business critical code, and cutting anyone down who dared to
| simply question why.
|
| These things cause ripples. The smartest and most capable staff
| leaves, what results is a churn of the same kind.
|
| But hey, they get a trip to Mexico every year and burn through
| millions every two years. Profit any day now.
| ehnto wrote:
| You definitely did see a difference between people who just
| copy pasted from stack overflow, and from people with good
| fundamentals. The uncomfortable truth though, is that the
| industry didn't need good coders, it needed a bucket load of
| basic web apps and it needed bums in seats.
|
| I think the irony of AI is going to be that it will make the
| remaining software jobs properly hard again, and implementers
| (ex coders) will be able to succeed with even less code
| knowledge than before.
| recursivedoubts wrote:
| As I tell my students: juniors, you must write the code
|
| https://htmx.org/essays/yes-and/
|
| Everyone else: we must let the juniors write the code.
|
| Seniors come from juniors. If you want seniors, you must let the
| juniors write the code.
| Thanemate wrote:
| The issue stems from 2 things:
|
| 1) People hearing "an LLM is as smart as a junior" and actually
| opting for the LLM subscription price instead of hiring a
| junior
|
| 2) The gap between senior and junior in terms of performance
| has become larger, since the senior devs had their hands get
| dirty for years typing stuff out manually AND also tackling
| challenges.
|
| This generation of junior-mid developers will have a
| significant portion of the "typing stuff" chopped off, and
| we're still pretending that this will end up being fine.
| jnwatson wrote:
| I think your second point is interesting, and it has actually
| already happened a couple of times.
|
| It used to be a lot easier to find devs that knew assembly
| and could navigate call stacks through memory by hand because
| a lot of folks had to learn that to get their job done. Now
| higher level languages have mostly eliminated that level of
| operation.
|
| The same applies to infosec roles. It is 10x harder for
| junior infosec folks than 20 years ago because there are a
| bunch of skills you need in infosec that today's mainline dev
| experience doesn't need, but were more common a while ago.
|
| Case in point, I remember working with a partner company's
| junior engineer on some integration. They needed some hard-
| coded constant changed and time was of the essence. I told
| them to change a couple bytes in the elf binary directly.
| They looked at me like I was a wizard. I thought it was a
| fairly pedestrian skill having grown up reversing computer
| game save files.
| mycall wrote:
| Hex editors are a black box to most 99% devs these days. I
| noticed their use falling off once code-signing came into
| use.
| wolttam wrote:
| I agree with the sentiments here. But, I'm less hopeful about
| the presented solutions.
|
| I think my argument against humans still needing to know how to
| manage complexity, is that the models will become increasingly
| able to manage that complexity themselves.
|
| The only thing that backs up that argument is the rate of
| progress the models have made in the last 3 years (ChatGPT
| turned 3 just 3 months ago)
|
| I think software people as a whole need to see that the
| capabilities won't stop here, they're going to keep growing. If
| you can describe it, an LLM will eventually be able to do it.
| mistrial9 wrote:
| disagree because when the "super fast" new CPUs of 20 years
| ago became common, it was easy to write code that executed
| slower than previous code, due to language constructs and
| wasteful work patterns. Therefore, I predict that LLM code
| can explode in complexity (14KLOC for a binary file parser
| with some features) but that compute will bog down and effort
| to understand will explode.. that is, in extreme cases.
| rco8786 wrote:
| > Seniors come from juniors. If you want seniors, you must let
| the juniors write the code
|
| The average tenure of a person in engineering role is so short
| that very few employers are thinking about developing
| individuals anymore.
|
| The actual way this gets approached is "If you want seniors,
| you must hire seniors".
|
| I'm not sure how this plays out now. But it's easy to imagine a
| scenario like the COBOL writers of the last generation.
| voxl wrote:
| It's a self inflicted wound. Companies do not reward loyalty.
| They do not give out raises congruent with what you can find
| if you leave. Business-types unirionically think seasonal
| layoffs is a "good thing." Self hemorrhaging your
| institutional knowledge is insanity
| rco8786 wrote:
| Is it? Seems to be working fine for most
| moomoo11 wrote:
| Ok but even pre ai I felt like each years interns wanted to
| take as many shortcuts as possible and not learn.
|
| I think the allure of high TC (150k base or more for entry
| level) led to many non engineer brained people to enter tech.
|
| Many people can do rote memorization, it's even ingrained
| heavily in some cultures iykyk. However they can't come up with
| much original or out of the box thinking.
| PetoU wrote:
| before you had a lesson that every engineer has to start with
| writing C, yet most of modern devs never did.
|
| Seniors should be prepared that Seniority will mean different
| thing and path of getting there will be different too.
|
| Just like there was a shift from lower lvl languages to high
| level
| dahart wrote:
| It's already getting harder to find juniors willing to write
| the code and harder to discern whether someone is as willing as
| they say. And I feel like asking junior to make this decision
| and just have self control is a tricky double edged sword. Even
| if I want them to (and I do!) the competitive and ambitious
| juniors I suspect will still lean into AI code gen heavily as
| it makes them look better and seem more productive. Seniors
| probably need to do more than let them write the code, we
| probably need to figure out ways to encourage, require, or even
| enforce it at some level, if we want it to happen.
| Tharre wrote:
| > Seniors come from juniors. If you want seniors, you must let
| the juniors write the code.
|
| Companies know this as well, but this is a prisoner dilemma
| type situation for them. A company can skip out on juniors, and
| instead offer to pay seniors a bit better to poach them from
| other companies, saving money. If everyone starts doing this,
| everyone obviously loses - there just won't be enough new
| seniors to satisfy demand. Avoiding this requires that most
| companies play by the rules so to say, not something that's
| easily achieved.
|
| And the higher the cost of training juniors relative to their
| economic output, the greater the incentive to break the rules
| becomes.
|
| One alternative might just be more strict non-competes and the
| like, to make it harder for employees to switch companies in
| the first place. But this is legally challenging and obviously
| not a great thing for employees in general.
| fluidcruft wrote:
| The way other professions do this is by burying trainees with
| debt and then writing off debt if they stay.
| raw_anon_1111 wrote:
| See Revature.
| sunir wrote:
| Not every career path starts at a software first company. Not
| every software first company works on the most intense
| codebase.
|
| And therefore in my experience not every senior engineer would
| hack it as a senior engineer at a more intense company myself
| included.
|
| This isn't a software unique experience. It's life.
| matt_heimer wrote:
| The real question will be; Do we need to pay the juniors to
| write code to become seniors?
|
| If coding is an art then all the juniors will end up in the
| same places as other struggling artists and only the breakout
| artists will land paying coding gigs.
|
| I'm sitting here on a weekend coding a passion project for no
| pay so I have to wonder.
| whattheheckheck wrote:
| So non technical business people will hire vibe coded
| seniors?
| smallstepforman wrote:
| The challenge is to get cost sensitive businesses to support
| this. Juniors are a cost and when trained move on, thats the
| fundamental problem. Retention only works with smart companues,
| for most other companies its a revolving door.
|
| On the plus side, as a dev with 30+ years of experience, I am
| commanding a very good contract salary these days. Revolving
| door companies stuck in process hell and product rot, and
| cannot deliver new value, so they're scrambling to find
| experienced devs that cost a premium. My salary today makes up
| for peanuts at the start of my career.
| dude250711 wrote:
| _> If you want seniors, you must let the juniors write the
| code._
|
| I do not want more juniors, because given time they will be my
| competition.
| garyfirestorm wrote:
| Yes and no. Often times managers are now asking ask Claude code
| to write it but I want it delivered tomorrow. This leads to us
| forcing to use LLM generated code without enough time to review
| or understand it.
| sarchertech wrote:
| I hope you don't have actual users.
| nkmnz wrote:
| Don't worry, he works for the DoW.
| adamtaylor_13 wrote:
| I can't seem to get the article to load, but I think I get the
| gist from the title.
|
| I hired a junior "dev" who literally hadn't even completed an
| HTML course. Before AI I could not have hired them because they
| literally did not know how to dev. After AI, anyone with a little
| grit can push themselves into the field pretty easily.
|
| As with everything in life: you can choose to hard route or you
| can choose the easy route and your results will follow
| accordingly.
| risyachka wrote:
| >> who literally hadn't even completed an HTML course.
|
| so what is their value? proxy your requests to ai?
| troad wrote:
| > As with everything in life: you can choose to hard route or
| you can choose the easy route and your results will follow
| accordingly.
|
| Hard agree, but probably not in the way you're implying.
|
| It's the difficult things that make life fun and interesting. A
| life spent going from one easy thing to another is a life
| barely lived at all.
| raw_anon_1111 wrote:
| From a professional standpoint, I've never found "enjoyment"
| from coding. I enjoy every part of the process of getting
| business goals from talking to stakeholders -> completed
| project with coding being the necessary evil.
|
| Funny enough, I started working in 1996 professionally (and
| had been a hobbyist for six years before going to college).
| But it was only between 2012-2016 that I was a ticket taker
| without working with the end user directly - everything I've
| done has been B2B.
|
| GenAI (and working remotely since 2020) has made me enjoy
| every part of my job.
| idontwantthis wrote:
| Why are you paying them instead of running the AI yourself?
| rsynnott wrote:
| > I hired a junior "dev" who literally hadn't even completed an
| HTML course.
|
| I mean, I'm a fairly senior dev, and have literally never
| completed, or indeed really heard of, a html course. Is that,
| eh, part of your average CS degree these days?
| cyberpunk wrote:
| 25 years doing distributed systems and best i can offer
| anyone is
|
| <marquee><h1><blink> welcome to cyberpunk's j33t website!!!
|
| :) :)
| rsynnott wrote:
| Fun thing about that:
|
| > Netscape has stipulated removal of the <marquee> element
| from the Internet Explorer during an HTML ERB meeting in
| February 1996, as a condition to removing the <blink>
| element from the Netscape
|
| It's like nuclear disarmament treaties, but for annoying
| things.
| cyberpunk wrote:
| Damn, my elite frontend skills are 30 years out of date?
|
| Better stick to apis then I guess.
| srfn wrote:
| Adam, can you please share, how in the world, this junior dev
| got hired with you?
|
| I'm self-taught dev with multiple years of experience. I choose
| the hard route, even after AI. For me, programming is theory
| building, so I always choose understanding above all else.
|
| Rock solid understanding of TypeScript, frontend and backed.
|
| I have sent 100s of CVs. For Juniors, Mids and Seniors. Not
| even a single interview.
|
| I will be glad for your thoughts on the matter.
| re-thc wrote:
| I assume junior devs can at least search. AI often doesn't even
| do that. That's why there are things like context7, which in a
| narrow context helps but not perfect.
|
| There are lots of ambiguous situations where a search and human
| "inference" can solve that AI still can't.
|
| I can tell the AI to do something, it uses the worst approach, I
| tell it a better way exists, it says it validated it does not, I
| link to a GitHub issue saying it can be done via workarounds and
| it still fails. It's worse for longer tasks where it always
| shortcuts to if it fails pick a "safe" approach (including not
| doing it).
|
| Funny enough we need the junior to guide the AI.
| kburman wrote:
| The "Junior Trap" is real: if you offload your thinking to Claude
| or GPT-4, you're hitting "Done" for the day, but you're accruing
| massive Learning Debt. You aren't building the failure-pattern
| recognition that actually makes an engineer valuable.
|
| In a world where "Code is no longer a skill," the only way to
| survive is to stop being a "Prompt Operator" and start being a
| "System Auditor." If you can't explain the trade-offs of the
| architectural pattern the AI just gave you, you aren't an
| engineer, you're just the person holding the screwdriver while
| the machine builds the house.
| pluc wrote:
| I can't wait until the AI people realize that without developers'
| original ideas, AI has nothing new to steal from. We don't
| create, AI will spit out the same old concepts. What, you're
| gonna create the next generation of AI by training it on what the
| very same AI has already produced? C'mon now.
|
| You don't get technical creativity reflexes by using AI. This is
| technical stagnation in the making. By cannibalizing its own
| sources, AI is ensuring that future generations are locked-in
| subscription models to do the most basic technical tasks. This is
| all obvious, yet we speed up every chance we get.
| microgpt wrote:
| I don't expect them to realise that until some time after it
| actually happens. When it remains a future hypothetical, it
| won't be accounted for.
| PetoU wrote:
| fwiw 90% of software is reinventing the wheel. 80% of devs have
| an itch to "rewrite from scratch".
|
| AI will deduplicate all of this
| pluc wrote:
| This is fine. How else do you learn but by taking things
| apart and rebuilding them? This obsession with productivity
| is incompatible with onboarding new talent. Having 1000
| versions of the same concept is exactly what progress is.
| skeledrew wrote:
| > 1000 versions of the same concept
|
| That sounds beyond wasteful.
| pluc wrote:
| It is. Humans are messy.
| debone wrote:
| My experience is that 100% of AI devs are reinventing the
| wheel, most of the time for no better reason than "I can do
| it" or "not invented here"
| pllbnk wrote:
| I opened LinkedIn today (out of habit) and the first post
| was someone explaining how much Slack costs and that with
| AI every company can build their own Slack for $100. So
| that person decided to build an open source Slack clone
| using Claude Code. Granted, these were a few sane comments
| showing good alternatives that have already been built.
|
| But for me it's been a signal that people have no
| imagination, so they are just burning tokens for no reason.
| dahart wrote:
| It might be a mistake to assume tomorrow's training looks like
| today's. Unsupervised learning is a thing and a very hot
| research topic, precisely because it avoids some of today's big
| problems with acquiring the vast amounts of training data
| necessary.
| greentea23 wrote:
| Unsupervised leanring has been around for years and is
| already how the current wave of models are trained. It
| doesn't mean no data, it means no human provided labels of
| the data. So you still need creative new human ideas to move
| LLMs forward. LLMs != intelligence.
| varispeed wrote:
| Exactly this. Even frontier models like Opus 4.6 have
| absolutely zero understanding of the task at hand. If you
| give them problem they have not encountered in training
| data, they will not solve it. You can however, guide them
| to resolve the problem, but in that case these get reduced
| to merely an auto complete. Don't get me wrong - models are
| getting better and hide very well that they don't
| understand anything, you can almost get fooled now.
| EGreg wrote:
| It isn't about training anymore. It is about harnesses.
|
| Just look at new math proofs that will come out, as one
| example. Exploration vs Exploitation is a thing in AI but you
| seem to think that human creativity can't be surpassed by
| harnesses and prompts like "generate 100 types of possible..."
|
| You're wrong. What you call creativity is often a manual
| application of a simple self-prompt that people do.
|
| One can have a loop where AI generates new ideas, rejects some
| and ranks the rest, then prioritizes. Then spawns workloads and
| sandboxes to try out and test the most highly ranked ideas.
| Finally it accretes knowledge into a relational database.
|
| Germans also underestimated USA in WW2, saying their soldiers
| were superior, and USA just had technology -- but USA out
| produced tanks and machinery and won the war through sheer
| automation, even if its soldiers were just regular joes and not
| elite troops.
|
| Back then it was mechanized divisions. Now it is mechanized
| intelligence.
|
| While Stalin said: Quantity has a quality all its own.
| pluc wrote:
| There is no "new ideas" with AI. Claiming the opposite is a
| fundamental misunderstanding of the technology.
| epgui wrote:
| While that's kind of true in some sense, I think there's an
| argument to be made for the contrary: that the mechanism
| for generating new ideas in humans is not quite as special
| as we would like to think.
|
| In other words, creativity in humans is arguably just as
| derivative as in machines.
| somenameforme wrote:
| I think this can be falsified by just considering the
| history of humanity. It wasn't that long ago that human
| language literally did not even exist. And our collective
| knowledge wasn't all that much more than 'poke him with
| the pointy end'. Somehow we went from that to putting a
| man on the Moon, unlocking the secrets of the atom, and
| more. And if you consider how awful we are at
| retaining/sharing information and just general
| inefficiencies due to the fact that we're humans and not
| just logical information processing machines, we did all
| of this in little more than the blink of an eye. This is
| something that seems to certainly be rather special.
| skeledrew wrote:
| All that humanity has achieved happened due to the simple
| loop of identifying a desire/need and finding a way to
| satisfy it. Also known as reinforcement learning. The
| only thing that really differentiates humans from
| machines is... history. We've been learning and passing
| on our knowledge to successive generations over
| millennia. Nothing really special there; give the
| machines a few years to learn and see what happens.
| freejazz wrote:
| What needs do machines have? What desires do they have?
| epgui wrote:
| I'm not claiming an LLM is structurally or functionally
| equivalent to a human brain. I just said that what we
| call "creativity" is in fact a very derivative thing.
| replygirl wrote:
| i don't think all sides of this discussion agree on what a
| "new idea" is. i am a very creative person but i've never
| had a truly original thought and i don't know how having
| one would be possible
| cyberpunk wrote:
| It depends on what layer you look at I think, shoulders
| of giants and all that..
| PetoU wrote:
| that's only partially true.
|
| AI can innovate in synthetic-realm of novel ideas, while
| real-world novelty will remain untouched.
|
| There are different types of novelties
| pluc wrote:
| If AI could innovate it wouldn't be a public product. It
| would be a cash cow. Why give your customers the ability
| to come up with new and amazing ideas when you can just
| keep it for yourself and launch a thousand products? USA
| is a capitalist society. It doesn't share profitable
| ideas.
|
| And if AI was really about productivity they'd be talking
| about doing more faster with the same workforce, not
| reducing the workforce.
| PetoU wrote:
| if you like, the business model is called Innovation-as-
| a-Service :)
|
| That's perfectly aligned with capitalistic motivations
| skeledrew wrote:
| What is a "real-world novelty" and what prevents AI from
| touching it?
| alemanek wrote:
| What I am excited about is the possibility of LLMs to draw
| conclusions from the last 150years of scientific papers.
|
| There have been lots of instances of knowledge being
| rediscovered even when it was previously published but
| sitting on some shelf forgotten. LLMs ability to digest
| large volumes of data will I think help with this issue.
|
| We will still need to reproduce and verify conclusions but
| will be interesting to see what might come from this.
| cyberpunk wrote:
| I hear this sentiment a lot but it doesn't ring true for
| me.
|
| What is an idea really and what's your definition of new?
|
| If i get a LLM to spit out, I dunno, a deployment system
| written in haskell that uses bittorrent or something, none
| of those bits are new, but certainly there will be unique
| challenges to solve in the code and it's a new system.
|
| Where is the line for new? Is it in combining old ideas? If
| not then does any software have "new" ideas? It's all
| combinations of processor instructions after all...
| electric_mayhem wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Profession_(novella)
| sunir wrote:
| Why would there be a lack of original ideas? People who are
| born to code so to speak will do it. Information wants to be
| free as the saying goes. It only takes one time for an
| innovation for it to be to copied everywhere.
|
| We don't need the same volume of developers to have the same or
| faster speed of innovation.
|
| And conversely if there is stagnation there is a capital
| opportunity to out compete it and so there will be a human
| desire to do the work.
|
| Tl;Dr. People like doing stuff and achieving. They will
| continue to do stuff.
|
| ps it's too much to claim other people don't experience
| creative ideas using AI. You don't really know that's true. It
| hasn't been my experience as I have had the capability and
| capacity to complete ideas on my back burner for decades and
| move onto the next thing.
| hluska wrote:
| That's the big scary point at the crux of all of this -
| you've had decades without the tooling to develop instincts.
| Nobody knows whether it's possible to develop instincts with
| the tooling or what those instincts will look like.
| Creativity takes a degree of skill to execute on and the
| concern is that we're potentially graduating people to
| painting the ceiling of the Sistine chapel before they've
| even learned to sketch.
|
| At minimum, our current generation of leaders will have to
| get much better at managing resources and building people up.
| We have to up our games and build environments where the
| pursuit of deep understanding is permissible. Unfortunately
| with the current hiring issues, it's totally understandable
| that young developers are scared to take time on tickets.
| sunir wrote:
| I can't repair my car, which used to be the hallmark of
| technical masculine skill in the era of Grease the musical,
| because mechanical maintenance is not primary in my
| lifetime. Nor do I have any idea how to manage a farm. I
| think the kids will be fine. On the other hand, I fear I
| will not survive once my Internet connection goes out.
| skeledrew wrote:
| Technically all the problems that almost any given business
| needs to be solved today has already been solved umpteen times
| over the years. There are no new problems that can't be solved
| by porting and/or combining old solutions.
| pluc wrote:
| That's the literal definition of stagnation. That is not
| compatible with growth.
|
| Also that's not a new idea, that "everything worth
| inventing/exploring has already been". It's precisely what AI
| reinforces, and that goes against human nature (and
| capitalism) as that statement has historically proved.
| lioeters wrote:
| "Everything has already been invented." - Some 19th-century
| scientist who had no imagination to see the wave of
| technological innovation that was coming.
| wolttam wrote:
| Maybe there aren't _that_ many new /necessary ideas that can be
| mined from the fundamental building blocks of software
| development (languages, syntax, runtimes, static analyses, type
| checking, etc). Maybe people will continue to innovate by
| instructing models to build novel things out of those building
| blocks? Perhaps things we would not have thought of building
| before due to the effort required without LLM assistance.
| estimator7292 wrote:
| Innovation is irrelevant to pushing up this quarter's numbers.
| No one actually values unique and novel ideas. The _only_ thing
| that matters is shipping something right now that can make an
| impact on this quarter 's numbers.
|
| Who cares if it's derivative slop or a straight up bootleg of
| something else so long as the number goes up
| andersmurphy wrote:
| It's the opposite. The less competent the average developer the
| more valuable coding LLMs become (as the only way for those bad
| developers to generate ok code). Eliminate the good developers
| and even bad coding LLMs become valuable.
| tinyhouse wrote:
| AI made juniors without potential useless, not all juniors.
| 13415 wrote:
| Useless? Where do they expect the senior engineers to come from
| in the future?
| paulsutter wrote:
| This is ridiculous. New developers will learn a completely
| different skill path from what we learned, and they will get
| where we are faster than we did.
| nextstepfan wrote:
| Actually the truth is that a lot of senior devs are not very good
| either, and have negative value. But they have an inflated value
| of themselves that does not reflect reality.
|
| Pretty much all software projects seem to peak, and then decline
| in quality. There are only a handful of senior devs in the world
| who are actually good programmers.
| zsoltkacsandi wrote:
| I agree. But it's not about that they have inflated value but
| it comes down to how "modern" software producing organizations
| work. Product managers and C-level people do not know what they
| are doing either. Most people are part of the "software
| engineering" theater, recruiters are recruiting, manager are
| managing, software developers are developing software, all of
| them just to get paid or gain status in the org. Most of the
| values come from that handful people who can really deliver.
| whattheheckheck wrote:
| Yeah read Software and Mind by Andrei Sorin
| slopinthebag wrote:
| > The mechanistic myth is the belief that everything can be
| described as a neat hierarchical structure of things within
| things. And few of us realize that our entire culture is
| based on this fallacy. While the world consists of complex,
| interacting structures, we prefer to treat every phenomenon
| as a simple, isolated structure.
|
| > Through our software pursuits, the mechanistic myth has
| spread beyond its academic origins, and is now affecting
| every aspect of human existence. In just one generation, it
| has expanded from worthless theories of mind and society
| (behaviour- ism, structuralism, universal grammar, etc.) to
| worthless concepts in the field of programming (structured
| programming, object-oriented pro- gramming, the relational
| database model, etc.) to worthless software-related
| activities that we all have to perform.
|
| > What is worse, our mechanistic beliefs have permitted
| powerful software elites to arise. While appearing to help
| us enjoy the benefits of software, the elites are in fact
| preventing us from creating and using software effectively.
| By invoking mechanistic software principles, they are
| fostering ignorance in software-related matters and
| inducing dependence on their systems.
|
| > Increasingly, in one occupation after another, all we
| need to know is how to operate some software systems that
| are based on mechanistic principles. But our minds are
| capable of non- mechanistic knowledge. So, when the elites
| force us to depend on their software, they exploit us in
| two ways: by preventing us from creating better, non-
| mechanistic software; and by preventing us from using the
| superior, non-mechanistic capabilities of our minds.
|
| > The ultimate consequence of our mechanistic culture,
| then, is the degradation of minds. If we restrict ourselves
| to mechanistic performance, our non-mechanistic
| capabilities remain un- developed. The world is becoming
| more and more complex, yet we see only its simple,
| mechanistic aspects. So we cope perhaps with the
| mechanistic problems, but the complex, non-mechanistic ones
| remain unsolved, and may eventually destroy us.
|
| Wow, I'm immediately hooked. The book is free online as
| well to download.
| palad1n wrote:
| tl;dr ask why
| BobbyJo wrote:
| Junior devs have always been useless. You used to give them tasks
| that take them a week or two even though a senior engineer could
| do it in a couple hours, not because you wanted them to
| contribute, but because you wanted them to learn to contribute.
|
| The same ethos makes sense with AI, it's just that every company
| is trying to avoid paying that training tax. Why turn a junior
| into a senior yourself if you can get the competition to pay for
| it instead.
| sunir wrote:
| Agreed. We are still in a capital crunch so overhiring is out
| of fashion. People don't remember the early 90s or the dot.bust
| when the same things were said.
|
| Kraft 1977 Programmers and Managers talked about this if I
| recall. Still the best alternate take on our industry I have
| ever read.
| raw_anon_1111 wrote:
| What's the importance of then learning to contribute if they
| will probably jump ship anyway when they get good enough? Your
| HR department is not going to give them a market rate raise to
| keep them - see salary compression and inversion. A junior
| developer just isn't worth the investment.
|
| I have never once told my manager "it would be really nice to
| have a few junior developers. It would really help us get this
| project done on time". They do "negative work".
|
| Yes not having juniors become seniors is an industry problem.
| But my goal is to reach my company's quarterly and anual goals
| - not what's going to happen 10 years from now.
| whattheheckheck wrote:
| Welcome to capitalism. Hire seniors and pay them 400k
| skeledrew wrote:
| Until there are no more "seniors"...
| raw_anon_1111 wrote:
| More money for me until I retire - well actually I'm past
| the point where I chase more money - and then after that
| - it's not my monkey and not my circus.
| raw_anon_1111 wrote:
| Again HN bubble thinking. Most developers in the US are
| working at banks, airlines, insurance companies, etc in
| second tier cities - in the "enterprise" and are not making
| "$400K". Most developers will never in their career see
| more than $175K inflation adjusted and I really haven't
| seen comp on the top end increase in nominal terms in a
| decade [1] for enterprise devs.
|
| That leads to my second point, in second tier cities, you
| see comp go from around $80K --> $115K -> $150K --> $175K,
| junior -> mid (pull well defined tickets off a board) ->
| Senior (leads larger initiatives) -> Senior+.
|
| For instance look at what Delta airlines pays based on
| Atlanta.
|
| https://www.levels.fyi/companies/delta-air-lines/salaries
|
| Why hire a junior at $80K when you can poach a former
| junior now mid level ticket taker for $115K?
|
| [1] after pivoting slightly to cloud + app dev customer
| facing/hands on keyboard consulting, I'm at a new plateau
| that's higher.
| addaon wrote:
| > I have never once told my manager "it would be really nice
| to have a few junior developers. It would really help us get
| this project done on time". They do "negative work".
|
| I have. A good junior can do in a week what a senior with
| domain knowledge can do in a half day, with only an hour of
| mentoring along the way. This isn't a great exchange rate per
| dollar (juniors are cheaper than seniors, but not that much
| cheaper) -- but seniors with domain knowledge are a finite
| resource, you can't get more of them for love or money, while
| juniors are fresh-minted every semester. The cheapest way to
| shipping may not go through juniors, but the fastest way
| usually does; and that's completely ignoring the HUGE side
| benefit of building seniors "the hard way," which is still
| easier than hiring.
| raw_anon_1111 wrote:
| And as a senior+ with domain knowledge, with AI I can do
| the work of two juniors without the communication overhead
| + do all of the project management, dealing with
| stakeholders, etc.
|
| But you don't build seniors, you build capable mid level
| ticket takers who jump for more money at the first
| opportunity.
| coffeebeqn wrote:
| And you can actually hand things off to them: this
| problem is now your problem. With AIs you're herding cats
| raw_anon_1111 wrote:
| How is that true? As an architect when I was working at
| product companies, the director/CxO wasn't going to call
| the junior developer to the carpet for not getting a task
| done or even the mid level ticket taker. Hell they don't
| even know what the individual tasks are. I'm going to be
| the one ultimately responsible either way for project
| success.
|
| Even when I was working at AWS as a mid level/L5 in the
| Professional Services division (lower title/lot more
| money), I was the one who was responsible for my
| "workstream" on larger projects. I couldn't say "that's
| not my fault. Blame the new L4 junior consultant who just
| got out of the internal boot camp for new grads".
|
| Now that I have moved back up to a more senior position
| in consulting, if a project I'm leading goes sideways, I
| can't tell the customer that it's not my fault, it's the
| fault of the workstream leads and the workstream leads
| can't tell me, it's the fault of the more junior
| consultants who work under them. They will never talk to
| the client. The people under the workstream leads may not
| even speak English.
|
| And that's not meant to be an insult. The workstream
| leads have to he able to speak passable English and they
| can work with people under then who only speak Spanish.
| eloisant wrote:
| Treat your employees well and they won't jump ship.
| raw_anon_1111 wrote:
| The problem is that (hypothetical) you as a line level
| manager don't control comp and raises. Even in BigTech your
| manager doesn't control your promotion and everyone knows
| it's better to "boomerang" because you will get paid less
| being promoted to an L5 (mid) from an L4 than someone hired
| as an L5.
| samrus wrote:
| Its not about treating them well. The environment and
| culture isnt the problem. Its that tech companies have
| decided that they dont like giving appropriate raises to
| current employees. They are somehow fine with paying the
| same or more money to bring in an equally qualified
| external hire. But not with retaining people. Idk why,
| maybe some stupid MBA rule, mayne theres some good reason
| behind it
| estimator7292 wrote:
| This is the difference between being an engineer and being a
| clock puncher. You don't care about the business, you don't
| care about the product, you don't care about society as a
| whole. So long as you get your paycheck and your annual pay
| bump, fuck absolutely everyone and everything else, right?
|
| Don't worry, just leave all your problems for someone else to
| fix. I'm sure that won't have any lasting consequences at
| all.
| raw_anon_1111 wrote:
| I work for one reason and one reason alone - to trade 40
| hours of labor for money to support my addiction to food
| and shelter. The company is not going to give me money for
| "caring about society". They are going to give me money to
| meet my quarterly goals to help them meet their profit
| goals for the company and in a former life , to make them
| look good for the public market pre-IPO and at another
| company for an acquisition.
|
| I give a company 40 hours a week and all of my 30 years of
| industry experience and they give me money (and in a former
| life RSUs)
| xtracto wrote:
| Sweet summer child. I was once opinionated and driven as
| you are now. I remember when I got out of college, I also
| thought like that of the mediocre clock punchers.
|
| Now at my 45 years, I couldn't care less for whatever grand
| objective the current company I work for has. I exchange my
| knowledge and time for hard cash, and let the owners , ceo
| and whatnot run with their grandiose vision.
|
| I only want to be left alone.
|
| We all get here. It's funny when we turn back.
| raw_anon_1111 wrote:
| Funny enough, the more I got into this mindset, I slept
| better, made more money, and got more autonomy.
|
| Once directors and CxOs know that you are completely
| aligned with the business goals and ignore everything
| else that "doesn't make the beer taste better", they
| trust your judgement and basically leave you alone.
| coldtea wrote:
| > _What's the importance of then learning to contribute if
| they will probably jump ship anyway when they get good
| enough? Your HR department is not going to give them a market
| rate raise to keep them - see salary compression and
| inversion._
|
| Obviously that hasn't historically been true, else there
| wouldn't be any senior developers as companies would have
| wised up to that and nobody would hire them as juniors.
|
| - Not everybody is a job hopper (even in Silicon Valley one
| sees that most junior FAANG devs stick around for a good
| while).
|
| - The HR department is absolutely going to give junior
| developers that pass the cut after a year or so a market rate
| raise.
|
| - In limited hiring periods, they'd be grateful to have the
| chance to stick around, while in bullish "boom" periods
| companies can afford to spend to keep people, expand and give
| them bigger roles, and so on. It's in the in-between that it
| becomes more problematic, but now we're in a "limited hiring"
| era.
|
| > _Yes not having juniors become seniors is an industry
| problem. But my goal is to reach my company's quarterly and
| anual goals - not what's going to happen 10 years from now._
|
| That's how companies fail.
|
| It's also not a good strategy at the personal level. If you
| command more devs, you get more leverage.
| raw_anon_1111 wrote:
| This is not true - the average tenure for a developer
| across the industry has been 3 years for well over a
| decade.
|
| > _The HR department is absolutely going to give junior
| developers that pass the cut after a year or so a market
| rate raise._
|
| This is also not true from small companies to FAANG - see
| "salary compression and inversion"
|
| > _That 's how companies fail._
|
| The company failing in the long term is really not any
| current employees main concern unless you are a founder if
| the average tenure is 3-5 years. Even the stock market
| doesn't care about the long term viability of a company.
|
| BigTech for instance can afford dead weight. Amazon has an
| internship program and for those who come back or through
| their non traditional programs for their internal
| consulting division (AWS Professional Services) they have a
| 3 (6?) month training program.
|
| In ProServe at least (former employee) even for their l5/L6
| employees, they have the 3 month training program - "AWSome
| Builder" where you simulate a customer project and have to
| pass.
|
| After leaving AWS and being hired as a staff consultant by
| a third party company, they put me on a plane two weeks in
| to meet with a customer. They don't even hire less than
| senior+ people in the US.
| coldtea wrote:
| > _This is not true - the average tenure for a developer
| across the industry has been 3 years for well over a
| decade._
|
| That counts temps, people who weren't a good fit and were
| let go early after hiring, mass layoffs, and mixes mixes
| startups and FAANG and consulting churn, none of which is
| the typical corporate IT worker scenario, and all of
| which bring the average down (but are not "hopping").
|
| Corporate IT, government IT, smaller SMEs, and stable
| SaaS, have higher averages.
| raw_anon_1111 wrote:
| Nope, it doesn't count temps at all. This is easily
| Googleable.
| coffeebeqn wrote:
| If the median tenure is 3 years and the software business
| still is very profitable then people must be net useful
| within that 3 years. A lot of people also just don't want
| to job hop much and honestly the interview culture keeps
| me from hopping more. I do still fall in the 3 years per
| hop but I've always had a good reason to- ie. layoffs,
| company going in a worse position than when I started,
| shit management at various levels, forever compounding
| responsibility...
| hackable_sand wrote:
| Completely misses the point of training someone
| raw_anon_1111 wrote:
| So exactly what is the point for a profit seeking company
| to train someone except thsr you expect them to bring you
| more business value than they cost during their tenure?
| dyauspitr wrote:
| It doesn't make sense to hire juniors at all other than as a
| service to society. I haven't hired a junior in 4 years. The
| one I hired 4 years ago was because not only did he do
| reasonably well on the interview but he literally begged me
| because he trained himself to do it while painting houses so
| I saw a lot of passion in him.
| samrus wrote:
| > But my goal is to reach my company's quarterly and anual
| goals - not what's going to happen 10 years from now.
|
| Your benefiting from the work of peopke who did worry about
| what will happen 10, or even 20 30 years down the line.
| People like you are why the rides gonna stop
| wonnage wrote:
| It's telling that OP worked at Amazon because this pretty
| much sums up the culture there - new grads churning through
| and burning out in two years while a few seniors stick
| around and perpetuate the cycle.
| raw_anon_1111 wrote:
| I was 46 when I was hired and it was my 8th job out of
| college. I was far from a naive college grad. I went in
| with a purpose - keep my head down for 4 years through my
| initial four year package, put it on my resume, build a
| network and leave for a smaller consulting shop.
|
| In fact the only reason I got my job there was because a
| recruiter reached out to me about an SDE job on the
| retail side. There was no way in hell that I was going to
| sell my big house in the burbs of Atlanta (at the time),
| uproot my life after Covid and work for _Amazon_. I knew
| what I would be getting into.
|
| She then told me about a "permanently remote","field by
| design" role at AWS ProServe. I was like sure why not?
| raw_anon_1111 wrote:
| So I should become a director or CxO of a company (because
| line level managers are powerless to do anything) so I can
| make those types of decisions?
|
| Not that I'm a line level manager - I'm just a high level
| IC who is at the same position on the org chart as a line
| level manager
| lokar wrote:
| Yep. This is why many companies have a terminal level with "up
| or out " rules. Before that level you are not fully independent
| and require too much supervision. No one wants a Jr engineer
| with 10 years of experience.
|
| I see a lot of Sr engineers get very frustrated by how much
| time they have to spend helping Jr engineers. But, that's the
| job, or at least a big part of it.
|
| Or at least it was.
| jfreds wrote:
| I burnt out helping a junior on my team for the past few
| months. It was just terribly obvious she was feeding my
| responses directly into a chatbot to fix instead of actually
| understanding the issue. I can't really even blame her, there
| isn't much incentive to actually learn
| hodgesrm wrote:
| That sounds like a bad hire, not a junior. Why didn't your
| manager help fix that?
| rsynnott wrote:
| I gather that quite a lot of companies are using dumb
| metrics which would show this as _good_ behaviour, these
| days.
| lokar wrote:
| Sure, but the overriding metric should be the opinion of
| the Sr engineer who is supposed to be mentoring and
| supervising the Jr
| rsynnott wrote:
| You'd hope, but, y'know, AI mania.
| lokar wrote:
| I've been in situations like that. For me, it's like
| interviewing, I just keep backing off, lowering the bar,
| making it easier and easier until they can get it, then
| start going back up again. I pretty quickly get a confident
| read on where they are.
|
| If at that point it's clear (to me) the situation is not
| salvageable, it's a management issue, I've done my job.
| rTX5CMRXIfFG wrote:
| I mean, if we're doing this, let's be honest and go as far as
| mid-level engineers whose work needs constant correction, as
| well as the many, many senior engineers out there who are
| senior only because they lucked out in getting the title during
| the artificial dev scarcity of the ZIRP eras.
| Retric wrote:
| I've gotten plenty of use out of junior devs. The critical bit
| is what makes anyone a useful worker. I've found anyone that's
| both dedicated and meticulous is worth the investment.
|
| Sure there's a wide range of skills and you can't just hand any
| task to anyone and expect it to work out but some fresh collage
| graduates are more capable than the average person with 5 years
| of professional experience. At the other end you need to focus
| on whatever they actually are capable of doing. 40+ hours a
| week can slowly expand even an extremely narrow skillet as long
| as they're a hard worker.
| raw_anon_1111 wrote:
| And have you compared the output of three junior devs to
| hiring one mid level ticket taker who isn't that much more
| expensive + AI coding agents?
| Retric wrote:
| You don't want 3 Jr devs at the same time because of
| diminishing returns. Most projects have grunt work where
| attention to detail is important but experience doesn't
| really help much. AI can quickly come up with alt text for
| images, but ensuring it's actually useful for someone using
| a screen reader is a different story.
|
| 1 new Jr every 2 years works quite well for a team of 7+
| developers.
| raw_anon_1111 wrote:
| And that junior dev will probably leave in 2 years
| because HR won't allow you to give them a raise to match
| their market comp.
|
| But with a team of 7, I can't believe that giving them
| all a Claude Code subscription wouldn't be much cheaper
| and much more productive than hiring a junior. A junior
| though with AI is more dangerous than a junior without.
| Retric wrote:
| That's not really an either or situation, you can have 7
| team members with Claud Code and 1 Jr without.
|
| I've seen many people stick around for a surprising
| amount of time while severely under compensated. I
| suspect that's why HR does it.
| raw_anon_1111 wrote:
| What's the use of the junior? You have just widen the gap
| between mid and junior developers making them less useful
| Retric wrote:
| Working on problems that are a poor fit for a mid level
| developer with AI assistance of which there are still
| plenty.
|
| I find AI tools make everyone better at exactly the same
| kind of problems, which means a larger percentage of
| what's left over is more cheaply done by Jr's working
| without AI assistance.
| bdangubic wrote:
| > I find AI tools make everyone better at exactly the
| same kind of problems
|
| Fascinating. I am finding the exact opposite, like
| complete 180
| Retric wrote:
| How exactly do some people leverage AI to rearrange the
| furniture in the conference room for an office party?
|
| Physical labor may be a tiny fraction of what a team of
| developers do, but I've seen what amounts to several
| thousand dollars spent on that kind of silly task because
| teams leverage the tools they have.
| raw_anon_1111 wrote:
| You pay contractors and caterers - that's a poor excuse
| ti have dead weight.
| Retric wrote:
| You just replaced one task that an AI is useless for with
| a different task that an AI is useless for.
|
| The point obviously still stands, and no I am not
| suggesting using Jr devs for physical labor alone is
| worth adding them to the team. Rather that "Work"
| includes a very wide variety of tasks that need to get
| done.
| bdangubic wrote:
| > I find AI tools make everyone better at exactly the
| same kind of problems
|
| this part I find fascinating. most places I worked (30
| years in, 10 as a contractor so quite a lot) the
| distinction between Jr, Mid and Sr falls exactly into the
| kind of works that they do. I, as a Senior, often work on
| hard shit, Jrs are not (yet) entrusted with those
| problems and work on entirely different set of problems.
| I cannot compute how AI makes everyone better at exactly
| the same kind of problems, problems I am solving today
| few people on my team are working on and then same goes
| down the "pyramid"
| raw_anon_1111 wrote:
| A mid level developer is just a ticket taker. That's
| their job. No matter what their title, if they are just
| pulling well defined tickets off the board, that's what
| they are.
| heresie-dabord wrote:
| > Junior devs have always been useless. You used to give them
| tasks [...] not because you wanted them to contribute, but
| because you wanted them to learn to contribute.
|
| Junior devs are by your own explanation _not useless_. They are
| the most important human investment in your project.
| watwut wrote:
| > Junior devs have always been useless. You used to give them
| tasks that take them a week or two even though a senior
| engineer could do it in a couple hours
|
| We havent dont it and I never seen something like that.
| hinkley wrote:
| Why? Because I learn every time I do.
| dude250711 wrote:
| _> ...not because you wanted them to contribute, but because
| you wanted them to learn to contribute._
|
| Rather because you want them to go away, because management
| conveniently forgot to reduce your load to account for time
| spent on mentoring.
| elephanlemon wrote:
| Strongly disagree with this. Bad junior devs might be useless,
| but I've seen good ones absolutely tear through features.
| Junior devs fresh out of school typically have tons of energy,
| haven't been burned out, and are serious about wanting to get
| work done.
| raw_anon_1111 wrote:
| And how do they compare to what a senior dev can do with
| Claude Code/Codex?
|
| I bet you a senior could do with one good prompt to Claude
| what a junior would take a day to do before AI - and take
| time away from the senior.
| bluefirebrand wrote:
| > I bet you a senior could do with one good prompt to
| Claude what a junior would take a day to do before AI
|
| It would still be a waste of a seniors time to write that
| prompt. They should have more important things to spend
| time on
| raw_anon_1111 wrote:
| And it's not a waste of their time to have to give
| detailed requirements and troubleshooting steps to a
| junior developer, constantly being interrupted, and then
| having to check their work thoroughly?
|
| If you have to be that detailed anyway - you might as
| well use AI.
| bluefirebrand wrote:
| No, teaching the next generation of humans is not a waste
| of time
|
| I'm very sorry for you that you think that way
| raw_anon_1111 wrote:
| So exactly how am I going to convince my management to
| open a req for a junior developer who is not going to
| help us meet our quarterly goals and take time away from
| the other senior developers that will either have to work
| longer hours or do less work?
|
| I'm not going to work as a charity and neither are any of
| my coworkers. We are all here to exchange labor for
| money.
| bluefirebrand wrote:
| _We_ as a collective need to convince our management of
| this, but that needs to start with people getting their
| heads out of their asses and working together instead of
| this mercenary attitude you have
| raw_anon_1111 wrote:
| _I_ don't have to do anything except keep my head down,
| do my job and enjoy my well earned autonomy. I'm
| definitely not going to try to convince my skip, skip,
| skip manager to change their hiring policies. It's not
| like my line level manager has any power over anything
|
| Even when I was at a startup before 2020 and I did have
| the ear of the CTO and the founders I knew my ultimate
| mission was to do what was needed to get acquired and
| before that I knew exactly what my mission was when k was
| hired to lead the tech initiatives as we were acquiring
| companies "find efficiencies" and go public.
|
| Or do you think I could have convince anyone of anything
| as an L5 at AWS in the middle between architect at a
| startup and my current company?
| Blackthorn wrote:
| Pretty favorably, because the coding agents suck.
| threatofrain wrote:
| Many juniors are actually very experienced but the industry
| can't see that on paper.
| bdangubic wrote:
| everyone was junior at one point, everyone. "junior" is just
| age mate, just age...
| nostrademons wrote:
| It's interesting that the same dynamic is playing out on a much
| larger scale with children. A child is far more helpless than a
| junior engineer - at least a junior engineer can feed
| themselves, wipe their own butt, avoid destroying the room, and
| generally keep themselves alive. Everybody wants to offload the
| cost of raising children to parents, because the economic
| benefits aren't realized for 25+ years yet the costs are very
| substantial (frequently, at least one parent's full-time
| attention, costing them an income). Prospective parents are
| saying "fuck that shit" and simply choosing not to have
| children.
|
| The long-term effects are going to be much like the effect of
| the software industry turning away from juniors: total
| collapse. When you have no workforce, you'll do no work - hell,
| there is just...nothing, nonexistence, no consumers either. But
| the fertility bust operates on a longer timescale (I think the
| software industry will start feeling the dearth of juniors in
| ~5 years, the economy as a whole won't feel the dearth of
| children for ~5), and it's far more fundamental. Rather than
| one industry disappearing, _all_ industries will disappear,
| likely refactored into something that looks far different.
|
| It also reminds me of those ecological predator/prey/locust
| models that I studied in calculus class, where population
| dynamics for many species have a tendency to overshoot the
| carrying capacity of the environment. Each individual in the
| population makes their own reproductive & survival decisions,
| but the sum total of them leads to population collapse and a
| near total extinction, followed by recovery once the survivors
| find resources abundant again.
| Root_Denied wrote:
| It's basically a "Tragedy of the Commons" situation across
| the board.
| wazoox wrote:
| Sort of. With the salient point that nothing really exists,
| but the commons. The individual is nothing without the
| whole society around.
| nostrademons wrote:
| Also sort of. _Some form_ of social organization seems to
| be necessary for humans to function. But humans are also
| pretty good (well - relatively speaking, it usually seems
| to require a war or revolution) at changing that form of
| social organization as technology, population, and
| environmental conditions change.
|
| I think this is a very likely outcome. We aren't going to
| get continued population growth next generation; a
| significant number of the people needed for it will never
| be born. This is going to have ripple effects across wide
| swaths of political and economic organization. But you'll
| have pockets of population that basically barricade
| themselves off from the wider economic world and insulate
| themselves from its collapse, and then the people within
| them, along with whatever form of social organization
| they happen to adopt.
| overfeed wrote:
| > When you have no workforce, you'll do no work - hell, there
| is just...nothing, nonexistence, no consumers either.
|
| _But for a beautiful moment in time, we created a lot of
| value for shareholders_
|
| https://www.insidehook.com/culture/story-tom-toro-new-
| yorker...
| thisisit wrote:
| > Junior devs have always been useless
|
| > The same ethos makes sense with AI, it's just that every
| company is trying to avoid paying that training tax.
|
| Last time when a junior dev was added to my team I had a
| similar thought. But then talking with management I was
| informed that things went beyond just training.
|
| The company had a social responsibility pledge and
| understanding with the local educational institutions. They had
| to pledge to be part of the internship and hiring activities
| every year. The company could not chose to be fair weather
| friends and try to recruit people only when they saw fit.
|
| The other aspect was cost. A team made of only senior engineers
| was costly.
|
| The last aspect was leveling up. Unless the company has lots of
| levels the team might end up lots of engineers at the same
| level. And with the inverted funnel nature of promotions it
| meant some engineers might end up waiting years for the
| promotion.
|
| So, it was better to have teams with some junior, intermediate
| and experienced engineers. That way costs and promotion flows
| were controlled.
|
| Now with AI the impact might go beyond junior devs. I see even
| the intermediate devs being impacted. It is more likely that
| companies think they can replace say 1 junior + 1 intermediate
| with 1 junior dev with AI. Or something along those lines.
| raw_anon_1111 wrote:
| Then don't base comp on promotions - problem solved.
| collingreen wrote:
| This kind of flippant approach is equally valid as "just
| use ai", "let other companies train the juniors", and
| "don't give promotions just hire new juniors + ai". All of
| these have obvious problems from their overly myopic
| viewpoint.
| raw_anon_1111 wrote:
| How is that flippant? I went from an "architect" over the
| entire cloud developmrnt strategy at a 60 person startup
| making $160K in 2020 to working at AWS ProServe making
| $220K (cash + signing bonus + RSUs) as an L5 (mid level -
| no longer there). Do you think I cared about my title?
|
| I said just the opposite - hire fewer seniors + AI and
| don't hird juniors.
|
| I'm now a staff level employee again at a 3rd party
| consulting company working with small and medium
| businesses (my preference) after taking a detour in
| BigTech from architectural roles at smaller companies. My
| quarterly strategic goals were a combination of what the
| CxO's/directors defined and what I defined was in the
| best interest of the company. None of those goals had
| anything to do with larger societal issues.
| torginus wrote:
| I think the idea of 'junior' needs to be refined a bit. By the
| time I got my first job I've been coding for years, and have
| built rather substantial things. In fact, in terms of pure
| coding ability, I was probably past the initial, fast part of
| my growth.
|
| As should have others, which the university education system
| should have made sure.
|
| The fact that some people come out of 4+ years of software
| engineering education utterly clueless means that they somehow
| managed to dodge having to build anything, I think means that
| they will never get good at any point in time, as they either
| were very talented at dodging having to build things, and I
| don't think that talent is going to abandon them, or they
| couldn't really grasp the basics in an environment designed for
| just that.
|
| With that said, I think you can see for most juniors, what you
| can expect out of them in terms of pure coding ability - sure a
| lot of them have room to grow, but I've met so many great
| people who were very young, yet were useful from day one.
|
| In fact, if you have the willingness to grind away at some
| problem, that puts you ahead of a significant amount of the
| pack. I have had the misfortune of working with people who
| lacked any demonstrable skill, and had coping strategies for
| having to deal with any sort of hardship. Getting useful work
| out of them was a challenge in of itself.
|
| These people managed to get the years in to be considered
| senior, and are probably dispensing their wisdom 'mentoring'
| juniors somewhere else, and are no longer expected to actually
| contribute to meaningful issues.
| seanmcdirmid wrote:
| I'm not sure if enthusiasts are the exception rather than the
| norm? I've noticed in the last few years, a lot of junior
| engineers do not have much active coding experience outside
| of their university education, they aren't the traditional
| "obsessed with computers and programming as kids".
| bluefirebrand wrote:
| There has been a much higher demand for software developers
| over the past 10-15 years than there are people who are
| obsessed with computers and programming
|
| If you look at the general topic shift on HN over the years
| it's obvious most people are getting into tech because they
| want power and money, not for love of tech
| seanmcdirmid wrote:
| > If you look at the general topic shift on HN over the
| years it's obvious most people are getting into tech
| because they want power and money, not for love of tech
|
| I think that is a bit presumptuous, even if there is a
| hint of truth there. Just because a kid didn't grow up
| around computers and programming shouldn't exclude them
| from the tech path or mark them as imposters/pretenders.
| coffeebeqn wrote:
| I've had some who are useful almost out of school. The amount
| of tickets is always growing and have someone pick up those
| "when things calm down I swear I'll address this" tickets is
| always helpful. If they can't get anything done by themselves
| in the codebase then it gets much harder. I do also think that
| some people have completely forgotten all the context they
| didn't have when they started off xx years ago so mentoring is
| not always very good
| weatherlite wrote:
| My nightmare scenario (which might start to materilize) is that
| our last years in the industry will be becoming prompt monkies /
| agent "managers" working on codebases we barely understand in
| such velocity there's no way we can gain real understanding.
| Whenever something breaks (and it will , a lot) A.I will fix it -
| or so we'll hope. And the sad thing is - this might work; you'll
| get more stuff done with fewer people. Sure, we didn't sign up
| for this, it's not a fun job what I've described, but why should
| management care? They have their own problems and A.I is
| threatening their jobs as well.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| > My nightmare scenario (which might start to materilize) is
| that our last years in the industry will be becoming prompt
| monkies / agent "managers" working on codebases we barely
| understand in such velocity there's no way we can gain real
| understanding.
|
| It will always be preferable to work on an understandable
| codebase, because that maximizes the AI's affordances too. And
| then the AI can explain things to you. A skilled human will
| always have a lot of solid knowledge relating to their hyper-
| specific niche that isn't part of your average general purpose
| AI, so humans will obviously have a key role to play still.
| oddsockmachine wrote:
| I'm already seeing this in the company I recently joined:
| 80-90% of code is generated/prompted. Big PRs, very little
| review or oversight. Absolutely nobody considering long-term
| architecture (and IMO nobody capable of such). In general,
| there's very little critical thinking involved at any stage,
| just throw error messages back into the LLM, rinse and repeat.
| I'm hoping there's a world where people with skills are useful
| in getting these projects back on track, but perhaps as a
| society we're learning to accept this reduction in quality.
| weatherlite wrote:
| And how do u sum up the tradeoffs so far, or is it too early
| to tell ? Do u see lots of unacceptable shit making into
| production that wouldn't have before A.I for example ?
| whateveracct wrote:
| Your codebase is essentially becoming bytecode
| braebo wrote:
| At work we build enterprise software with stuff like
| Kotlin+Spring + multiple NextJS apps + Microservices + Rust CAD
| engine.
|
| I haven't have written code aside from tweaking stuff here and
| there in probably 3 or 4 months. Before that I wrote code by
| hand every day for many years.
|
| I've found a lot of fun parts of my new workflow that I enjoy.
| I still miss being fully immersed in a problem deep in the
| files... and sometimes it feels like homework reading so many
| implementation summaries from Claude because the feature spans
| 4 repos and is too much code to read. But I do love shaping the
| code into different solutions exploring in a way that is unique
| to ai native workflows. And I love building agent skills and
| frameworks with/around them and expanding it out to more
| aspects of the company or life -- there's deep work to be had
| that still feels like hacking in the trenches. I get a lot of
| the same satisfaction in different ways, and there's a lot of
| exciting novelty to explore that was previously out of reach
| due to time and energy constraints.
|
| Also I don't like our backend stack and I hate React / NextJS
| to the degree of derangement syndrome -- I am so happy that I
| don't have to write it and I can just focus on UX, making
| customers happy / lives easier / shaping the software into
| better and better versions of itself at such a faster pace.
|
| People who learned good software engineering intimately before
| the inflection point are extremely lucky right now. Existential
| dread and the stages of grief have been a part of the journey
| for me too sadly, but there's a lot to celebrate and explore
| with the right attitude.
| tetraodonpuffer wrote:
| I feel the same way, I have many years of experience, and I
| have gone from writing everything by hand to using claude
| code all the time (my latest company is very pro doing
| everything with AI).
|
| Since I have been a software architect for the past 7-8 years
| it feels in some ways that that experience makes using claude
| code a lot more productive than for my non-architect
| colleagues, as I am able to steer it much more effectively
| whether directly in sessions or via custom skills / mcp.
|
| The big issues right now for me are hiring and manager
| expectations, I changed positions last fall due to mass
| layoffs and it took me 3 months to find one: having leetcode
| interviews in the current climate seems completely useless,
| even more than it was in the past, and system design
| interviews are so formulaic it also feels like a crapshoot.
| Plus every job getting hundreds of AI generated applications
| makes actually being considered in the first place quite
| difficult.
|
| Manager expectations are also ridiculously inflated nowadays,
| it seems most action items that come are claude written with
| fantastical random statistics (if you add caching you can
| make your backend 98.3% faster!), and it takes so much time
| to fight this and unrealistic team velocity expectations.
|
| Interesting times, I do feel lucky I have had a long career,
| but I very much fear the ladder being pulled up even more
| than it has been when outsourcing because widespread. I know
| everybody says "things always change, new opportunities will
| open up to compensate for the ones that are being lost" but
| this time it does feel different, and not in a good way.
| prescriptivist wrote:
| Things are changing so fast and so chaotically with this
| technology. I'm also writing everything now using Claude
| code, and I've been thinking a lot about what this means
| for my work moving forward. One thing I've noticed, is that
| I will just keep hammering and hammering on my work until I
| force myself to quit. Even on the weekend I feel the pull
| to go work on it. I'm just less sort of mentally exhausted
| by work, I suppose, but I don't think that's particularly
| healthy if it leads to me working way more than I should.
| On one hand, I think that's a reflection of how powerful
| and exciting this technology is, but on the other hand, I
| think that it triggers some different kind of reward
| function in my mind that I'm not used to.
|
| In any case, I think if one wants to continue to have a
| career in this industry for years to come, it's basically
| table stakes to become fluent in using these tools.
| chris1993 wrote:
| Similarly, I started using Claude to add some features to an
| native app on iOS and Android in early January. That was so
| successful (tooks days instead of weeks) I started applying
| it to client work and basically haven't written any
| substantial code since. A big change from around 40 years of
| writing code pretty much every day and I'm enjoying the
| increased velocity from not having to web search for API and
| CSS syntax details.
|
| My son, working in another dev company, reports the same - he
| basically hasn't written much actual code for about three
| months. It's a massive change.
| ThrowawayR2 wrote:
| It already happened. The old timers correctly observe that
| modern applications are bloated and inefficient because of all
| the heavyweight frameworks, excessive abstraction layers, and
| "left-pad culture" where external dependencies are pulled in to
| do the most trivial things but that these things enabled less
| capable developers to effectively build software to fulfill
| industry demand. LLM-only coders are just the next step in the
| devolution.
| dgellow wrote:
| That's literally what
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47157039 seems to be
| about, and I had the same reaction as you
| jmyeet wrote:
| It's interesting to watch industry after industry hollow itself
| out from the inside then inevitably die long after all the
| financial people, investment bankers and management consultants
| have all cashed their checks.
|
| Steve Jobs famously accurately called this out years ago [1].
|
| Xerox, Boeing, PC manufacturers (who basically created the
| Taiwanese makers through a series of short-term outsourcing
| steps), etc. But there are two examples I want to talk about
| specifically.
|
| First, one lasting impact of the 2008 GFC was that entry-level
| jobs disappeared. This devastated a generation of millenial
| college graduates who suddenly had a mountain of student loan
| debt (thanks to education costs outpacing inflation by a lot) but
| suddenly no jobs. It became a bit of a joke to poke fun at such
| people who had a ton of debt and worked as baristas but this was
| a shallow "analysis". It was really a systemic collapse. Those
| entry-level workers are your future senior workers and leaders.
| Those jobs have never come back.
|
| The rise of DVR/TiVo and ultimately streaming brought on a golden
| age of TV in the 2000s. It was kind of the last hurrah for
| network shows that produced 22 episodes a year before streamers
| instead produced 8 episodes every 4 years.
|
| But what made this system work was an ecosystem. Living in LA,
| Atlanta and a few other places was relatively cheap so aspiring
| actors and writers and entertainmnet professionals could get by
| with secon djobs and relatively low income. These became the
| future headline actors and senior professionals. Background work
| and odd jobs were sufficient. Background work also taught people
| how to be on a set.
|
| Studios still had large writing staffs. Some writers would be on
| set. Those writers were your future producers and showrunners.
|
| Part of what supported all of this was syndication. That is,
| networks produced shows and basic cable channels would pay to
| rerun them. Syndicating some shows was incredibly profitable in
| some cases (eg Seinfeld).
|
| So the streamers came along and stripped things down. They got
| rid of junior positions. They adopted so-called "mini writing
| rooms". Those writers didn't tend to ever be on set. The runs
| were shorter and an 8 episode series couldn't support a writer in
| the same way a 22 episode series could. The streamers then were
| largely showing just their own content so residuals and
| syndication fees just went away.
|
| All of this is short-term thinking. Hollywood has been both a
| massive industry and a source of American soft power
| internationally by spreading culture, basically.
|
| I think the software engineering space is going through a similar
| transformation to what happened to the entertainment industry. A
| handful of people will do very well. AIs will destroy entry-level
| jobs and basically destroy that company and industry's future.
|
| I predict in 10-20 years we'll see China totally dominating this
| space and a bunch of Linkedin "thought leaders" and politicians
| will be standing around scratchin their heads asking "what
| happened?"
|
| [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K1WrHH-WtaA
| ThrowawayR2 wrote:
| I've seen a lot of hot takes on HN but faulting streamers for
| the inability of Hollywood to adapt to cultural and
| technological change is gonna require oven mitts. The rise of
| streaming is a win for the little guy and the viewers against
| Hollywood's capitalist entertainment oligopoly.
| raw_anon_1111 wrote:
| I did my first completely vibe coded not looking at a line of
| code implementation last year and my second this year.
|
| I could care less about why either Claude, Codex or before that a
| developer was using a for loop or a while loop. I did and do care
| about architecture.
|
| I'm no more going to review every line of code with AI than I am
| when I was delegating to more junior developers. I'm going to ask
| Claude Code about how it implemented something where I know there
| is an efficient way vs naive way, find and test corner cases via
| manual and automated tests and do the same for functional and non
| functional requirements.
| ivanjermakov wrote:
| Copying homework and cheating at exams don't make student learn.
|
| It takes time to become a junior too. Emerging tech landscape
| could affect skills and knowledge that is expected from entry
| level job applicants.
| sega_sai wrote:
| I recently read a similar discussion in the context of AI in
| science and PhD students. And the point the author was making
| that the goal of having PhD students is _NOT_ to produce academic
| research, but to train people. I think the same idea applies
| here. Somebody still needs to train people, and the companies
| will probably need to ensure that they have resources for that,
| as there will not be enough senior people for all the tasks.
| whattheheckheck wrote:
| Back to fuedalism we go!
| selimthegrim wrote:
| I understand that but try getting hired in industry as a PhD
| with that argument.
| hluska wrote:
| > If I'm reviewing your code and I ask you why you went with a
| certain approach, and you tell me "the AI suggested it", I've
| immediately lost confidence in you.
|
| I've experienced similar things and so understand the feeling,
| but this is poor leadership. If someone on your team makes it all
| the way to a code review and still thinks 'the AI suggested it',
| you failed to train them, failed to set expectations and they
| have justifiably lost more confidence in you than vice versa.
|
| If we analyze the rest of the article through the lens of weak
| leadership, it sounds less like an AI problem and more like a
| corporate leadership problem.
| FpUser wrote:
| Problem is not making juniors useless. They kind of are by
| definition. Problem is that now they have very little chance to
| become seniors.
| raegis wrote:
| "juniors are useless": Maybe y'all should consider updating
| this hyberbolic language. Nobody is born a "senior developer",
| so surely all of your training as a "junior" is not useless.
| There is always a disconnect between what younger people know
| and what older people expect them to know, so training is
| required almost universally.
| FpUser wrote:
| >"juniors are useless. Maybe y'all should consider updating
| this hyberbolic language"
|
| Don't be so dense. It is a figure of speech. We all were
| useless at some point. Nothing to be ashamed of
| mh2266 wrote:
| This post, ironically, seems very likely to have been written by
| an LLM :/
|
| "it's not x, but y", with bonus em-dash:
|
| > your value as a developer is not in your ability to ship code.
| It's in your ability to look at code
|
| "But here's the thing."
|
| "And honestly?"
| opem wrote:
| I think so. Just go to the homepage, all of the thumbnails are
| AI generated with clickbaity titles.
| pelasaco wrote:
| "AI is making junior devs useless" is a dangerous and incorrect
| conclusion. If this idea is repeated too often, people may start
| to believe it and even quit studying computer science altogether.
|
| First of all, developers who only learn to code in a short
| bootcamp are often not well prepared -- but that was already true
| before AI. In the past, many junior developers were students who
| were learning programming while studying, not just people who
| took a quick Python course on Udemy.
|
| Instead of declaring junior developers useless, we should raise
| the standard: learn how to code properly, how to maintain code,
| understand networks, and build strong foundations in math and
| computer science. A well-trained junior developer is still
| extremely valuable and will always be needed.
| lenerdenator wrote:
| You're going to have to do the unthinkable:
|
| Invest in the training of your junior employees.
|
| The cost of generating code is now laughable, so that's not the
| economic value brought to the table by a junior engineer, or
| really, any engineer. The value is now generated by _knowing what
| code is good code_. You 're going to have to have talks, book
| clubs, hackathons, and the like to get your juniors to know what
| good code is. Do they know what design patterns are? How about
| good architecture? If they can't name a few design patterns,
| you're not investing enough.
| thallavajhula wrote:
| Just another silly uninformed take.
| kshahkshah wrote:
| I see so much creativity coming from young developers I just
| can't agree. Yes most developers in the past 20 years who were
| only chasing big tech money were useless. Good riddance
| amelius wrote:
| It also makes junior devs unobtainable. Because who in their
| right mind is going to start a career in CS these days?
| holtkam2 wrote:
| Idk, anyone who wants to understand and apply the most powerful
| and transformative technology in human history...?
| amelius wrote:
| 1. There isn't much to understand about this technology.
|
| 2. Unlike in the past, you can't program the technology
| without having billions in cash.
| mdavid626 wrote:
| It feels like to me that junior devs don't understand what they
| even need to learn. They just use agentic coding to get things
| done, without any deeper knowledge.
|
| The worst is, they think they know exactly what they need to
| learn, and also think they can make good decisions.
| rishabhaiover wrote:
| Every week, I read an article on the consequences of reliable
| coding agents in SWE industry. All such discussions on HN leads
| to a fundamental suspicion of the empirical scaling laws of LLMs
| or the infinite greed and short-sightedness of the market in
| inflating a bubble. I'm tired.
| borzi wrote:
| This is 100% an issue on the side of the senior developers.
| Imagine saying "these juniors are useless" because you are making
| them work in assembly, but C has just been released. You are
| giving them menial work that is no longer required to do by
| humans. Instead of giving them the task "update these email
| templates", the norm should be: "create this new service that
| automates an internal process". They will make mistakes and they
| will learn - but what they will be doing is going to be very
| useful and also give them chance to grow the necessary skills for
| this new era, with the supervision of a senior.
| JeremyNT wrote:
| I think the issue is they used to make progress at a snails
| pace and you had plenty of teachable moments.
|
| Now anybody can vibe code something that seems to work with a
| million landmines.
|
| How can they develop the intuition around this given that they
| don't know what they don't know? How can we review it and help
| them get there?
|
| Maybe we can figure it out, but I'm not sure it's easy or
| obvious.
| borzi wrote:
| By making them walk into the landmines and forcing them to
| fix it - that is how everyone became a good programmer. It's
| just the scope that has changed.
| daxfohl wrote:
| Nah, it makes _teams_ useless. Maybe not quite yet, but soon, one
| engineer will be able to do a few sprint teams ' worth of work,
| and deliver features orders of magnitude faster than a team
| working in parallel. Yeah, generally at first this will be
| seniors only. But before long, a junior will be able to come in
| and learn to manage one sprint team's worth of work under the
| guidance of a senior and partnered with a PM, and grow the
| product from there. Long term, I imagine 90% workforce reduction
| will be the norm. Just about all software is a rinse and repeat
| of some other software, not much true innovation, so picking and
| choosing and implementing some other software's feature into your
| own will start to become trivial single-day projects from start
| to finish. Hopefully AI creates some new industries that SWEs can
| roll into, but I'm feeling more doomer every day.
| borzi wrote:
| Yeap, and people are still forcing juniors to make small code
| changes when they should be learning by creating entire apps on
| their own, deploying them, etc. WITH a senior giving them
| feedback occasionally. I think people are going to take a while
| to catch on though, for better or worse....
| daxfohl wrote:
| Yeah, IMO one of the first things we'll see change is more of
| a migration back to monoliths. Right now adding a feature has
| to go through multiple teams, a dozen services, a coordinated
| implementation and deployment schedule, a Byzantine and often
| manual set of integration tests, etc. Yeah AI can help with
| that, but the point is that AI doesn't need it. On a
| monolith, it sucks for dev teams because parallel development
| at large scale is difficult and other teams' bugs can delay
| the launch of your unrelated project. Hence, microservices
| became popular. With AI, development happens so fast that
| it's largely serial. So there's no real coordination needed.
| A whole feature is one PR, one set of tests, one app to run
| locally if you want, one deployment, one thing to look at and
| roll back if there's a bug. Creates a virtuous cycle all the
| way up.
|
| I imagine lots of established companies will struggle
| migrating back to that pattern, but I have to think most new
| companies will head in that direction, which should let them
| catch up quickly.
|
| Anyway that's my take. We'll see.
| guax wrote:
| Ai might bring forward the standardisation we never had. If
| coding dynamics shift enough then all the opinions about
| libraries and engines and frameworks might get less focused on
| readability and more on efficiency and easy composition by Ai.
|
| Security gets outsourced to audited layers and Ai does the stupid
| boring jobs of gluing them together. Some developers become more
| specialised and niche, some pivot to product, some pivot to other
| areas.
|
| There are plenty of people who joined software for the payout and
| hate it. Plenty of people who grown to hate it over time.
|
| I've been enjoying using it to figure out toy projects but paying
| an API and depending on a service to code is very sour. I really
| hope hardware specialises and local models become good enough.
| Gate keeping development on centralised services would be a loss
| for everyone and ripe for dystopian outcomes.
| opem wrote:
| Is this writeup AI generated?
| keeda wrote:
| I maintain that in the future, any person wishing to learn _any_
| skill (not just coding!) will need to willingly eschew the use of
| AI when learning until they have "built the muscles". The
| literature is clear that repeated, hands-on practice is really
| the only way to build skills.
|
| I suspect the progression will be "No AI until intuition
| (whatever that is for that skill)" -> "Gradual use of AI to
| understand where it falls short" -> "AI native expert".
|
| How to actually implement this at scale is still TBD ;-)
| Ironically, AI will be invaluable for this e.g. as a hyper-
| personalized tutor but it will also present an irresistible
| temptation to offload the hands-on practice. We already have
| studies indicating the former is helpful but the latter stifles
| mastery. At this point I can only see self-discipline as a
| mechanism to willingly avoid AI.
|
| Unfortunately, our testing-oriented education system only serves
| to incentivize over-reliance on AI (Goodhart's Law etc.) None of
| our current institutions and processes are suited for what is
| already happening and will only accelerate from here on. Things
| will need to change radically.
|
| For this reason, I once predicted apprenticeships will be a thing
| again, and already there are signs with Microsoft's preceptorship
| proposal: https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3779312
|
| This is highly encouraging because a tech giant is not only
| acknowledging the problem, but proposing a solution. Not a
| complete solution by far but at least a start.
| h4kunamata wrote:
| The silver line is not to avoid AI but to use it wisely, and this
| is coming from somebody who used to hate AI.
|
| I am not a Python developer or developer for the matter but
| Perplexity AI did help me to understand the bsic of Python for
| API requests and get projects delivery with 94% code coverage and
| vulnerability free.
|
| AI also reduced the time spent with Ansible playbook generation,
| but I do know Ansible, I do know Linux, homelab is my hobby so I
| am not just doing copy and paste. I review whatever it generates
| and correct it when required.
|
| In the companies I have worked and work, I see developers
| themselves confessing "I used AI, it works but idk how"!
|
| AI itself does not make you useless, only and only if you used it
| as a smart search engine.
|
| If you are doing copy/paste, you are going to get so screwed
| professionally speaking.
|
| Folks are no longer learning and what they are doing, AI can do
| on its own.
|
| That is making some developer useless.
| cryptonector wrote:
| > > For someone like you, who likely has years of experience
| without LLMs, your brain totally understands good code/bad code,
| good architecture, and just general intuition around code and
| systems. LLMs must be an absolute gamechanger. But for someone
| like me who is starting out in this field, how am I supposed to
| build the years of experience and intuition that comes from
| manually writing code and building systems when companies are
| expecting AI to be used from here on out?
|
| Answer: juniors need to work with seniors, and the seniors need
| to teach the juniors, and the juniors need to learn to use LLMs
| to _learn_ , not just to do the work.
| ramon156 wrote:
| Next year I'm going to experience my first junior, which is crazy
| considering I have 3 YOE. Nonetheless I'm very curious what kind
| of graduates come out of the current education
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2026-03-01 23:01 UTC)