Some engineers on my team at Assembled and I have been a part of the alpha test of Codex, and I'll say it's been quite impressive. We’ve long used local agents like Cursor and Claude Code, so we didn’t expect too much. But Codex shines in a few areas: Parallel task execution: You can batch dozens of small edits (refactors, tests, boilerplate) and run them concurrently without context juggling. It's super nice to run…
If you aren't hiring junior engineers to do these kinds of things, where do you think the senior engineers you need in the future will come from? My kid recently graduated from a very good school with a degree in computer science and what she's told me about the job market is scary. It seems that, relatively speaking, there's a lot of postings for senior engineers and very little for new grads. My employer has hired…
It stops juniors investing their life/time/energy in a field that is shrinking and that will increasingly "not be worth it" w.r.t effort put in given their longer time horizon. This is how capitalism when working correctly can obsolete jobs somewhat charitably - it does it by closing the door on entry level jobs ideally when people have little to lose and haven't yet invested a lot of their life into it. For example they may still be young enough to re-train; or may be dismayed from entering the field due to disruption/chatter and so do something more appropriate in the new world.
Being hired in a sinking and increasingly more competitive field may actually be considered a "winner's curse" outcome, in that you will be in a industry highly competitive that is slowly sinking and is stressful with low opportunities for pay rises compared to other industries/skill sets - this is definitely playing your career in "hard mode". Most of all you will feel your skills, and value is useless relatively to people who got into more jobs with more scarcity playing life in "easy mode" with less stress and anxiety. In a few years time people getting into other fields may feel they "dodged a bullet" comparing themselves to others that did.
Being able to pivot while you are still young and ageism isn't a barrier yet is definitely something to consider remembering careers these days are multi-decades long. I feel for your kid now, and I do for mine, but I would rather than try something different in their 20's vs say their 40's when they have a mortgage, a family to feed, and/or other commitments and ageism makes it harder to pivot/re-train into another career. I don't wish my kids to feel the anxiety I and many people I know are feeling later in life especially for a career that requires constant effort to maintain and keep relevant in. I'm not recommending my kids learn what I do at all for example.