AI is making junior devs useless • Hacker News Board

Re: AI is making junior devs useless

#251

Post by cryptonector » Sun, Mar 01, 2026, 10:50 PM UTC

> > 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.

Re: AI is making junior devs useless

#252

Post by raw_anon_1111 » Sun, Mar 01, 2026, 10:51 PM UTC

wonnage wrote: post #247

samrus wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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

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.

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?

Re: AI is making junior devs useless

#253

Post by ramon156 » Sun, Mar 01, 2026, 10:54 PM UTC

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

Re: AI is making junior devs useless

#254

Post by mycall » Sun, Mar 01, 2026, 10:56 PM UTC

jnwatson wrote: post #124

Thanemate wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 p…

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…

Hex editors are a black box to most 99% devs these days. I noticed their use falling off once code-signing came into use.

Re: AI is making junior devs useless

#255

Post by epsylon » Sun, Mar 01, 2026, 11:05 PM UTC

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, not because you wanted them to contribute, but because you wanted them to learn to contribute.

I don't know, I've known kids who can run circles around a lot of seniors, whether it's knowledge, coding chops or just intuition. The reason a newcomer takes a week to complete a task that requires two hours is because the senior has already learn all the ins and outs of the crappy software lifetime processes (usually dealing with half broken build / code review / ticket systems)

Re: AI is making junior devs useless

#256

Post by rhubarbtree » Sun, Mar 01, 2026, 11:06 PM UTC

I don’t know if this is related, but the standards of CS university courses in the UK are objectively way below what they were 25 years ago. You can compare two syllabuses from the same course and the difference is shocking.

It may be AI has raised the bar, but also that junior devs out of uni are just much worse than they used to be.

Re: AI is making junior devs useless

#257

Post by raw_anon_1111 » Sun, Mar 01, 2026, 11:12 PM UTC

Blackthorn wrote: post #249

raw_anon_1111 wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Pretty favorably, because the coding agents suck.

So do junior devs. I’ve gotten great results treating coding agents as junior devs where I keep my hands on the wheel

Re: AI is making junior devs useless

#258

Post by prpl » Sun, Mar 01, 2026, 11:21 PM UTC

I think this is true, but I think it’s quite possible an inversion could come

Re: AI is making junior devs useless

#259

Post by alternatex » Sun, Mar 01, 2026, 11:22 PM UTC

HDThoreaun wrote: post #117

DJBunnies wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This just means you have bad juniors who aren’t interested in learning.

It's easier to be lazy now more than ever. Hard to blame them because the temptation to deliver and prove oneself as a junior is always high.

I can't count how many seniors have forgotten what it means to understand the code they're merging since AI coding tools became popular. So long as businesses only value quantity the odds are stacked against juniors.

Re: AI is making junior devs useless

#260

Post by Blackthorn » Sun, Mar 01, 2026, 11:27 PM UTC

raw_anon_1111 wrote: post #257

Blackthorn wrote: post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pretty favorably, because the coding agents suck.

So do junior devs. I’ve gotten great results treating coding agents as junior devs where I keep my hands on the wheel

Some of you folks think way too highly of yourselves. Junior devs are awesome. You tell them what needs doing, if it's not well defined you have them write a document to figure it out, and then they churn away at it and will often surprise you with a brilliant solution.

Meanwhile, I've never once seen a coding agent give a brilliant solution or design to just about anything, and anything with the barest whiff of undefined-ness will simply zero in on your existing biases.

This whole thread reads like absolute insanity to me. I love getting new junior devs. They do great work.