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AI is making junior devs useless

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Re: AI is making junior devs useless

#91

Post by skeledrew »

pluc wrote: post #26

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…

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.

Re: AI is making junior devs useless

#92

Post by wolttam »

pluc wrote: post #26

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…

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.

Re: AI is making junior devs useless

#93

Post by skeledrew »

pluc wrote: post #40
PetoU wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

fwiw 90% of software is reinventing the wheel. 80% of devs have an itch to "rewrite from scratch". AI will deduplicate all of this

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.

> 1000 versions of the same concept

That sounds beyond wasteful.

Re: AI is making junior devs useless

#94

Post by addaon »

raw_anon_1111 wrote: post #65
BobbyJo wrote: post #45

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…

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 projec…

> 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.

Re: AI is making junior devs useless

#95

Post by watwut »

BobbyJo wrote: post #45

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…

> 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.

Re: AI is making junior devs useless

#96

Post by hinkley »

BobbyJo wrote: post #45

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…

Why? Because I learn every time I do.

Re: AI is making junior devs useless

#97

Post by weatherlite »

oddsockmachine wrote: post #85
weatherlite wrote: post #49

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…

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 use…

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 ?

Re: AI is making junior devs useless

#98

Post by braebo »

weatherlite wrote: post #49

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…

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.

Re: AI is making junior devs useless

#99

Post by pelasaco »

"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.

Re: AI is making junior devs useless

#100

Post by jfreds »

lokar wrote: post #68
BobbyJo wrote: post #45

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…

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.

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
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