I'm tired of being told what things aren't or what they don't do.
AI didn't erase the junior engineer's value, it increased it it
91–100 of 151 posts
Re: AI didn't erase the junior engineer's value, it increased it it
#92So surely there's more demand to hire junior engineers and their salaries have gone up?
Re: AI didn't erase the junior engineer's value, it increased it it
#93Earlier quoted context omitted.
Claude writes technical word salad that people hate reading. It’s writing docs nobody looks at and nobody cares about. Technical writing is a skill just like any other form of writing and if you’re bad at it that’s on you. People despise AI slop novels and they also despise AI slop technical documents.
And even with that fable would be more capable than you. You just don't know how to harness it with the right context maybe.
Honestly it sounds like you don't know what you're talking about.
Re: AI didn't erase the junior engineer's value, it increased it it
#94Earlier quoted context omitted.
Good riddance. Worked with many offshored firms before, from all over the world. The work was subpar before and it’s even worse now. Now I can fire off agents ona remote box to do the grunt work and open PRs, then just prompt to review/iterate it. No timezone timezone delays or language barriers. Nearly instant feedback. Coding is solved. Engineering is not. Catch up or be left behind.
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You're far enough behind that you had to create a burner account to tell someone to self-harm.
Re: AI didn't erase the junior engineer's value, it increased it it
#95Earlier quoted context omitted.
Making changes to someone else’s PR (other than extremely trivial ones) feels like they don’t have much ownership. People often have a reason for doing things the way they did and skipping over them seems like a mistake.
We do architecture reviews now. Code reviews are going away because agents handle it. When I ask an agent to do a code change for a PR, it’s because it’s not something I think the other engineer really should waste their time on. It’s on the same level as nitpicking what lines the braces go on before we had auto-formatters and lint checkers in CI. Other staff engineers I rarely even see their code. I trust them to be…
> Code reviews are going away because agents handle it.
Agents don't "handle" code review. With no human in the loop, there is no difference between "generating" code and "reviewing" code. Let's not bastardize the word "review". The code is unreviewed. Now, whether that's a dealbreaker or not for your project or company is a different question.
Personally, I've found that unreviewed LLM code unnecessarily explodes in complexity and the credit / token cost per change increases in tandem as the LLM pulls more into its context window. This is especially the case when you let it go wild on test cases. We don't have an unlimited budget for AI, maybe you do, so this is a concern for us. So we've decided to continue to review code and ask LLMs to significantly reduce the complexity of their generated code - which is a task that we're finding they are extremely bad at.
They're probably extremely bad at reducing complexity because the incentive for frontier model providers might be to train models that are capable of one-shotting flappy bird, instead of models that are capable of maintaining mature code bases that already have an implementation of the ad-hoc parsing function it just generated, as well as the newly-generated 50 test cases for it.
Re: AI didn't erase the junior engineer's value, it increased it it
#96> The junior engineer executes it, which nowadays means prompting it to an AI tool, and creating a pull request (PR). The PR receives feedback from more senior engineers. The junior engineer gets the feedback and takes it to the AI tool again, proposing changes. Yeah this part should not exist anymore. It doesn’t where I work. When I get a PR I just ask an agent to make the proposed changes. There is absolutely zero…
Is all of hackernews webdev only? I can’t imagine “coding not being a job anymore” in fields like automotive, medical, military, robotics, and HPC
Re: AI didn't erase the junior engineer's value, it increased it it
#97> The junior engineer executes it, which nowadays means prompting it to an AI tool, and creating a pull request (PR). The PR receives feedback from more senior engineers. The junior engineer gets the feedback and takes it to the AI tool again, proposing changes. Yeah this part should not exist anymore. It doesn’t where I work. When I get a PR I just ask an agent to make the proposed changes. There is absolutely zero…
Is all of hackernews webdev only? I can’t imagine “coding not being a job anymore” in fields like automotive, medical, military, robotics, and HPC
Of course not, but consider the size of the field if the “webdev” stuff goes away. Competition for the remaining positions in other domains become more competitive and you may find the floor rising faster than you can? Or you’ll find that weak, but cheap heuristics will throw you out with the chaff.
Re: AI didn't erase the junior engineer's value, it increased it it
#98And then the senior engineer burns the f#ck out.
Reviewing 100 lines of Junior dev slop was bad enough. Now 1000 lines of misguided jr dev ai slop?
Ugh.
Re: AI didn't erase the junior engineer's value, it increased it it
#99Earlier quoted context omitted.
You misunderstood my reply. I'm talking about culture, not engineering or coding. I'm just grateful I don't work with people that say "good riddance" to blanket foreign talent bans, and "catch up or get left behind" to fellow engineers. That doesn't sound like a nice place to work? Is all I'm saying.
I don't think this is related to culture, it's just the internet nowadays. You need hot takes for engagement. That user probably runs with that mindset always on
Or, you know, just plain ol’ racism
Re: AI didn't erase the junior engineer's value, it increased it it
#100Earlier quoted context omitted.
Ownership of what then?
Ownership of the delivered code. This takes authorship out of the equation -- doesn't matter who wrote it, only matters who owns it and can be blamed for it. Not having written it doesn't absolve blame when something goes bad.
Ownership of something you have little control over is a great way to burn yourself out.
If you constantly have to push back against the eager puppy jr dev who’s 1000% sure their vibe slop is prod ready and has proudly told the admiring crowd of stake holders it’s ready to go, wtf kind of life is that? Now the senior/lead is the bad guy and is in the no win scenario.
Yuck.