Revenge of the Junior Developer

Much of this post was spot on — but the blind spots are highly problematic.

In this agentic AI utopia of six months from now:

* Why would developers — especially junior developers — be assigned oversight of the AI clusters? This sounds more like an engineering management role that’s very hands on. This makes sense because the skill set required for the desired outcomes is no longer “how do I write code that makes these computers work correcty” and rather “what’s the best solution for our customers and/or business in this problem space.” Higher order thinking, expertise in the domain, and dare I say wisdom are more valuable than knowing the intricacies of React hooks.

* Economically speaking what are all these companies doing with all this code? Code is still a liability, not an asset. Mere humans writing code faster than they comprehend the problem space is already a problem and the brave new world described here makes this problem worse not better. In particular here, there’s no longer an economic “moat” to build a business off of if everything can be “solved” in a day with a swarm of AI agents.

* I wonder about the ongoing term scaling of these approaches. The trade off seems to be extremely fast productivity at the start which falls off a cliff as the product matures and grows. It’s like a building that can be constructed in a day up to a few floors but quickly hits an upper limit as your ability to build _on top of_ the foundational layer of poorly understood garbage.

* Heaven help the ops / infrastructure folks who have to run this garbage and deal with issues at scale.

Btw I don’t reject everything in this post — these tools are indeed powerful and compelling and the trendlines are undeniable.

We're using Cline, and it's very easy to blow through $20-40 if you get going. The value proposition is absolutely there so we eat the cost, but OP is correct in that agentic coding eats tokens like there's no tomorrow.

I agree with the spirit of the argument, but I don’t think you’re taking into account the scale of “typing” we’re talking about now.

For example, yesterday I needed a parser for a mini-language. I wrote a grammar — actually not even the formal grammar, just some examples — and what I wanted the AST to look like. I said “write the tokenizer”, and it did. I told it to tweak a few things and write tests. It did. I told it to “write a recursive descent parser”, and it did. Add tests and do some tweaks, done.

The whole thing works and it took less than an hour.

So yeah, I had to know I needed a parser, but at that point I could pretty much hand off the details. (Which I still checked over, so I’m not even in full vibe mode, guess.)

There is so much hype around agents but I am still thoroughly unimpressed.

They’re fine at basic tasks, but nothing more.

Cryptocurrency allows people who are otherwise limited by draconian payment platform limitations, puritanical moralists who own credit card companies and such to buy and sell things online without being stopped. It's obviously not a good system but it provides a high effort release valve, a fallback mechanism that hopefully will undermine some of these draconian measures. Lots of people have been helped by the existence of cryptocurrency because of this, especially since lately a lot of bad actors control payment platforms and often just shut down businesses on whims.

Whether more have been helped or hurt is debatable but it certainly has a tangible, if niche, use case with real value. It certainly has no value as a store of value, though.