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AWS CEO says replacing junior devs with AI is 'one of the dumbest ideas'

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Re: AWS CEO says replacing junior devs with AI is 'one of the dumbest ideas'

#171

Post by SketchySeaBeast »

salawat wrote: post #67
orliesaurus wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

ON TOP OF IT ALL, juniors are the ones who bring novel tools to the desk MOST times...i.e. I had no clue the Google IDE gave you free unlimited credits despite the terrible UI...but a young engineer told me about it!!

I'm just shocked people aren't clueing into the fact that tech companies are trying to build developer dependence on these things to secure a "rent" revenue stream. But hey, what do I know. It's just cloud hyper scaling all over again. Don't buy and drive your own hardware. Rent ours! Look, we built the metering and everything!

I'd hope people are. It's painfully obvious this entire AI push is rent-seeking half hidden by big tech money. At some point the free money is going to go away, but the rent for every service will remain.

Re: AWS CEO says replacing junior devs with AI is 'one of the dumbest ideas'

#172

Post by throwaway613745 »

beAbU wrote: post #128
simonw wrote: post #7

Relevant post by Kent Beck from 12th Dec 2025: The Bet On Juniors Just Got Better https://tidyfirst.substack.com/p/the-bet-on-juniors-just-got... > The juniors working this way compress their ramp dramatically. Tasks that used to take days take hours. Not because the AI does the work, but because the AI collapses the search space. Instead of spending three hours figuring out which API to use, they spend twenty minute…

Isn't the struggling with docs and learning how and where to find the answers part of the learning process? I would argue a machine that short circuits the process of getting stuck in obtuse documentation is actually harmful long term...

The best part is when the AI just makes up the docs

Re: AWS CEO says replacing junior devs with AI is 'one of the dumbest ideas'

#173

Post by jimbokun »

beAbU wrote: post #128
simonw wrote: post #7

Relevant post by Kent Beck from 12th Dec 2025: The Bet On Juniors Just Got Better https://tidyfirst.substack.com/p/the-bet-on-juniors-just-got... > The juniors working this way compress their ramp dramatically. Tasks that used to take days take hours. Not because the AI does the work, but because the AI collapses the search space. Instead of spending three hours figuring out which API to use, they spend twenty minute…

Isn't the struggling with docs and learning how and where to find the answers part of the learning process? I would argue a machine that short circuits the process of getting stuck in obtuse documentation is actually harmful long term...

Why?

If you can just get to the answer immediately, what’s the value of the struggle?

Research isn’t time coding. So it’s not making the developer less familiar with the code base she’s responsible for. Which is the usual worry with AI.

Re: AWS CEO says replacing junior devs with AI is 'one of the dumbest ideas'

#174

Post by Terr_ »

pizza234 wrote: post #139
beAbU wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't the struggling with docs and learning how and where to find the answers part of the learning process? I would argue a machine that short circuits the process of getting stuck in obtuse documentation is actually harmful long term...

It really depends on what's being learned. For example, take writing scripts based on the AWS SDK. The APIs documentation is gigantic (and poorly designed, as it takes ages to load the documentation of each entry), and one uses only a tiny fraction of the APIs. I don't find "learning to find the right APIs" a valuable knowledge; rather, I find "learning to design a (small) program/script starting from a basic example…

> It really depends on what's being learned.

Also the difference between using it to find information versus delegating executive-function.

I'm afraid there will be a portion of workers who crutch heavily on "Now what do I do next, Robot Soulmate?"

Re: AWS CEO says replacing junior devs with AI is 'one of the dumbest ideas'

#175

Post by Ancalagon »

JKCalhoun wrote: post #167
orliesaurus wrote: post #37

Interesting take... I'm seeing a pattern... People think AI can do it all... BUT I see juniors often are the ones who actually understand AI tools better than seniors... That's what AWS CEO points out... He said juniors are usually the most experienced with AI tools, so cutting them makes no sense... He also mentioned they are usually the least expensive, so there's little cost saving... AND he warned that without a…

> I'm seeing a pattern... Me too. Fire your senior devs. (Ha ha, not ha ha.)

No no, fire them.

Cannot wait for the 'Oh dear god everything is on fire, where is the senior dev?' return pay packages.

Re: AWS CEO says replacing junior devs with AI is 'one of the dumbest ideas'

#176

Post by jaredcwhite »

The level of cynicism here is astronomical. After discovering the strategy of "fire juniors and let a few seniors manage autonomous agents" was an abject failure, now the line is "actually juniors are great because we've brainwashed them into thinking AI is cool and we don't have to pay them so much". Which makes me want to vomit.

The only relevant point here is keeping a talent pipeline going, because well duh. That it even needs to be said like it's some sort of clever revelation is just another indication of the level of stupid our industry is grappling with.

The. Bubble. Cannot. Burst. Soon. Enough!!

Re: AWS CEO says replacing junior devs with AI is 'one of the dumbest ideas'

#177

Post by itissid »

I gave opus an "incorrect" research task (using this slash command[1]) in my REST server to research to use SQLite + Litestream VFS can be used to create read-replicas for REST service itself. This is obviously a dangerous use of VFS[2] and a system like sqlite in general(stale reads and isolation wise speaking). Ofc it happily went ahead and used Django's DB router feature to implement `allow_relation` to return true if `obj._state.db` was a `replica` or `default` master db.

Now claude had access to this[2] link and it got the daya in the research prompt using web-searcher. But that's not the point. Any Junior worth their salt — distributed systems 101 — would know _what_ was obvious, failure to pay attention to the _right_ thing. While there are ideas on prompt optimization out there [3][4], the issue is how many tokens can it burn to think about these things and come up with optimal prompt and corrections to it is a very hard problem to solve.

[1] https://github.com/humanlayer/humanlayer/blob/main/.claude/c... [2] https://litestream.io/guides/vfs/#when-to-use-the-vfs [3] https://docs.boundaryml.com/guide/baml-advanced/prompt-optim... [4]https://github.com/gepa-ai/gepa

Re: AWS CEO says replacing junior devs with AI is 'one of the dumbest ideas'

#178

Post by schainks »

beAbU wrote: post #128
simonw wrote: post #7

Relevant post by Kent Beck from 12th Dec 2025: The Bet On Juniors Just Got Better https://tidyfirst.substack.com/p/the-bet-on-juniors-just-got... > The juniors working this way compress their ramp dramatically. Tasks that used to take days take hours. Not because the AI does the work, but because the AI collapses the search space. Instead of spending three hours figuring out which API to use, they spend twenty minute…

Isn't the struggling with docs and learning how and where to find the answers part of the learning process? I would argue a machine that short circuits the process of getting stuck in obtuse documentation is actually harmful long term...

Disagree. While documentation is often out of date, the threshold for maintaining it properly has been lowered, so your team should be doing everything it can to surface effective docs to devs and AIs looking for them. This, in turn, also lowers the barrier to writing good docs since your team's exposure to good docs increases.

If you read great books all the time, you will find yourself more skilled at identifying good versus bad writing.

Re: AWS CEO says replacing junior devs with AI is 'one of the dumbest ideas'

#179

Post by skydhash »

Ifkaluva wrote: post #164
beAbU wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't the struggling with docs and learning how and where to find the answers part of the learning process? I would argue a machine that short circuits the process of getting stuck in obtuse documentation is actually harmful long term...

No :) Any task has “core difficulty” and “incidental difficulty”. Struggling with docs is incidental difficulty, it’s a tax on energy and focus. Your argument is an argument against the use of Google or StackOverflow.

Not really. There’s a pattern to reading docs, just like there’s a pattern to reading code. Once you grasped it, your speed increase a lot. The slowness that junior has is a lack of understanding.

Complaining about docs is like complaining about why research article is not written like elementary school textbooks.

Re: AWS CEO says replacing junior devs with AI is 'one of the dumbest ideas'

#180

Post by NewJazz »

itissid wrote: post #177

I gave opus an "incorrect" research task (using this slash command[1]) in my REST server to research to use SQLite + Litestream VFS can be used to create read-replicas for REST service itself. This is obviously a dangerous use of VFS[2] and a system like sqlite in general(stale reads and isolation wise speaking). Ofc it happily went ahead and used Django's DB router feature to implement `allow_relation` to return tru…

I'm not sure a junior would immediately understand the risks of what you described. Even if they did well in dist sys 101 last year.
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