Coding expertise is going to collapse from AI reliance

> The trillion-dollar bet that is being made is: this knowledge won't matter, because LLMs will take up the slack and effectively become the new generation of "developers". It starts give off an aire of hubris that drove past no-code movements, and the fever dreams of CEOs, rather than the reality on the ground.

Yes, this is the bet being made by everyone, together. No, nobody is actually making it.

The cost and benefit of a pipeline to train programmers is an externality. You do not benefit from training programmers as you do not employ them long enough to get a return on that investment. However you will hire some programmer hired by someone else and get the benefit of their investment. It kind of ended up as a wash, and there was enough 'shit shoveling' work to make it economical to keep some junior engineers around to keep senior engineers happy, and some of those junior engineers would learn and grow and end up as the next generation of actually productive engineers.

This entire system has already collapsed. Junior engineers are not low value and thus low wage anymore, they are highly negative in value, as before they would puzzle on something for days and finally come back with a small PR that kind-of worked but needed revision. Now they can puke out 50,000 lines of code that they don't understand in 3 hours. You'll never be able to make them sit and just do stuff by hand, and they can't supervise an AI. Having them around means you'll have to basically ignore them and not look at whatever they are trying to do, and never use any of the code, or else you will waste orders of magnitude more senior engineer time as they are forced to de tangle the mess to even understand what it does. Or you just go with it and in 3 months you have 25 million lines of code and no person or AI can make a change anymore without breaking 15 things.

There is no benefit to any company, at least in countries where you can't lock someone into a very long term contract, in hiring junior engineers anymore, so they will just stop doing this. If they did hire juniors it wouldn't help them, as they will still demand much more pay and leave if you don't give it to them the moment they can pass interviews at a more senior level. So they are just going to stop, the pipeline will dry up, and they'll pay a lot more for senior people as the supply gets more and more scarce. This is self reinforcing, the more you pay them the earlier they will retire.

By the time governments and the industry are feeling enough pain to do something about this salaries will be out of control.

> All those layers have been "left behind" to become specializations.

This never happened. The people who understood and worked with all of that still exist. I wouldn’t be surprised if there’s not more of them now. What happened is more people who didn’t need to know all of that joined the circus.

Really?

I just did the LoC measure that isn't "official" but actually closer to how AI would read it: I.e. simply actual lines. Never mind "context window".

Just in the actual source folder there are 1.9 million lines. That's not tokens. Lines. Not even LoC as per some official canonicalized definition. Various languages. ~15 year old code base.

We work with Claude just fine.

For variable measures of "fine" depending on how much devs just trust whatever Claude spits out ;)

Sydney, a scaleup you probably haven’t heard of and that I am prevented by contract from naming

If there is a severe shortage of labor, that'll happen. I think I remember reading about teachers being paid big bucks in Switzerland?