Ask HN: Am I getting old, or is working with AI juniors becoming a nightmare?

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Yes, absolutely, if you don't use AI in coding you will be a legacy developer sooner rather than later.

Everyone seriously doing it has a bunch of agents in a corporate like structure doing code reviews, the bad AI code is when someone is just using a single instance of Claude or Chat, but when you have 50 agents competing to write the best code from a single prompt, it hits differently.

Actually not worried about unemployment. This is an awesome development thing - called technological progress.

PS: Compare Assembly with Python - for sure the ration is more then 10x. Still we need much more devs compared to early days. For me the question is what the future software dev looks like (if the job still exists).

We’ve had a looming crisis for decades of young people increasingly not understanding a lot of the fundamentals of mathematical logic. And I think treating LLMs (which are amazing tools) as “AI,” and having it play this type of role, is the final step towards a lot of unrecoverable self-destruction.

We need to remember that the core of what “logic” is can be understood by every human mind, and that it’s our individual responsibility to endeavor to build this understanding, not delegate or hand-wave it. For all of human history, delegating/hand-waving away basic logic that can be understood by actuarial/engineering types has never gone well in the long term.

MichaelRazum, you're hitting on something crucial many of us in the trenches are seeing. The "code is cheap" mentality, as you call it, leads to bloated, unreadable code. As baCist points out, if AI starts training on its own generated code, we're headed for a real problem with quality degradation.

I've found experienced developers leverage AI as a force multiplier because they can scrutinize the output, unlike juniors who often just paste and move on. The real skill is becoming an AI orchestrator, prompting effectively, and critically validating the output. Otherwise, if you're just a wrapper for AI, then yes, you become the "legacy developer" you mention because you're adding no critical thinking or value.