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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'

#191

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've seen seniors and juniors bring novel tools in. Seniors do it less often perhaps - but only because we have seen this before under a different name and realize it isn't novel. (sometimes the time has finally come, sometimes it fail again for the same reason it failed last time)

I've seen seniors bring up novel ideas to juniors—well, novel to the juniors anyway.

Just an example. I've been in so many code bases over the years… I had a newer engineer come aboard who, when he saw some code I recently wrote with labels (!) he kind of blanched. He thought "goto == BAD". (We're talking "C" here.)

But this was code that dealt with Apple's CoreFoundation. More or less every call to CF can fail (which means returning NULL in the CF API). And (relevant) passing NULL to a CF call, like when trying to append a CF object to a CF array, was a hard crash. CF does no param checking. (Why, that would slow it down—you, dear reader, are to do all the sanity checking.)

So you might have code similar to:

CFDictionary dict = NULL;

dict = CFCreateDictionary();

if (!dict)

    goto bail;
You would likely continue to create arrays, etc—insert them into your dictionary, maybe return the dictionary at the end. And again, you checked for NULL at every call to CF, goto bail if needed.

Down past 'bail' you could CFRelease() all the non-null instances that you do not return. This was how we collected our own garbage. :-)

In any event, goto labels made the code cleaner: your NULL-checking if-statements did not have to nest crazy deep.

The new engineer admitted surprise that there might be a place for labels. (Or, you know, CF could have been more NULL-tolerant and simply exited gracefully.)

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

#192
The thing people miss in these “replace juniors with AI” takes is that juniors were never mainly about cheap hands on keyboards. They’re the only people in the org who are still allowed to ask “dumb” questions without losing face, and those questions are often the only signal you get that your abstractions are nonsense.

What AI does is remove a bunch of the humiliating, boring parts of being junior: hunting for the right API by cargo-culting Stack Overflow, grinding through boilerplate, getting stuck for hours on a missing import. If a half-decent model can collapse that search space for them, you get to spend more of their ramp time on “here’s how our system actually fits together” instead of “here’s how for-loops work in our house style”.

If you take that setup and then decide “cool, now we don’t need juniors at all”, you’re basically saying you want a company with no memory and no farm system – just an ever-shrinking ring of seniors arguing about strategy while no one actually grows into them.

Always love to include a good AI x work thread in my https://hackernewsai.com/ newsletter.

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

#193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>but because the genie, used well, accelerates learning. This is "the kids will use the AI to learn and understand" level of cope no, the kids will copy and paste the solution then go back to their preferred dopamine dispenser

I've learned a lot of shit while getting AI to give me the answers, because I wanted to understand why it did what it did. It saves me a lot of time trying to fix things that would have never worked, so I can just spend time analyzing success. There might be value in learning from failure, but my guess is that there's more value in learning from success, and if the LLM doesn't need me to succeed my time is better spe…

Do you honestly think that’s how people learn?

This is an example of a book on Common Lisp

https://gigamonkeys.com/book/practical-a-simple-database

What you usually do is follow the book instructions and get some result, then go to do some exploration on your own. There’s no walk in the dark trying to figure your own path.

Once you learn what works, and what does not, then you’ll have a solid foundation to tackle more complex subject. That’s the benefit of having a good book and/or a good teacher to guide you to the path of mastering. Using a slot machine is more tortuous than that.

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

#194
1. replacing junior engineers, with AI ofcourse breaks the talent pipeline. Seniors will retire one day, who is going to replace them? Are we taking the bet, that we wont need any engineer at that time? sounds dangerous.

2. Junior engineer's heavy reliance on AI tools is a problem in itself. AI tools learn from existing code that is written by senior engineers. Too much use of AI by junior engineers will result in deterioration of engineering skills. It will eventually result in AI learning from AI generated code. This is true for most other content as well, as more and more content on internet is AI generated.

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

#195
post #128
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...

Feel free to waste your time sifting through a dozen wrong answers. Meanwhile the rest of us can get the answers, absorb the right information quickly then move on to solving more problems.

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

#196

I - senior - can patch an application in an unknown language and framework with the AI. I know enough to tell it to stop the wildly stupid ideas. But I don't learn. That's not what I'm trying to do- I'm trying to fix the bug. Hmm. I'm pretty sure AI is going to lead us to a deskilling crash. Food for thought.

On the contrary, being able to access (largely/verifiably) correct solutions to tangible & relevant problems is an extremely great way to learn by example.

It should probably be supplemented with some good old RTFM, but it does get us somewhat beyond the "blind leading the blind" StackOverflow paradigm of most software engineering.

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

#197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've learned a lot of shit while getting AI to give me the answers, because I wanted to understand why it did what it did. It saves me a lot of time trying to fix things that would have never worked, so I can just spend time analyzing success. There might be value in learning from failure, but my guess is that there's more value in learning from success, and if the LLM doesn't need me to succeed my time is better spe…

Do you honestly think that’s how people learn? This is an example of a book on Common Lisp https://gigamonkeys.com/book/practical-a-simple-database What you usually do is follow the book instructions and get some result, then go to do some exploration on your own. There’s no walk in the dark trying to figure your own path. Once you learn what works, and what does not, then you’ll have a solid foundation to tackle mor…

I don't find it to be more torturous than that. In fact, if I were to go back and learn lisp again, I think I'd be a lot more motivated seeing how to build something interesting out of the gate rather than the toy programs I learned in my racket course.

Also, for a lot of things, that is how people learn because there aren't good textbooks available.

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

#198

I - senior - can patch an application in an unknown language and framework with the AI. I know enough to tell it to stop the wildly stupid ideas. But I don't learn. That's not what I'm trying to do- I'm trying to fix the bug. Hmm. I'm pretty sure AI is going to lead us to a deskilling crash. Food for thought.

> I'm pretty sure AI is going to lead us to a deskilling crash.

That's my thought too. It's going to be a triple whammy

1. Most developers (Junior and Senior) will be drawn in by the temptation of "let the AI do the work", leading to less experience in the workforce in the long term.

2. Students will be tempted to use AI to do their homework, resulting in new grads who don't know anything. I have observed this happen first hand.

3. AI-generated (slop) code will start to pollute Github and other sources used for future LLM training, resulting in a quality collapse.

I'm hoping that we can avoid the collapse somehow, but I don't see a way to stop it.

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

#199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It may well be. Books have tons of useful expository material that you may not find in docs. A library has related books sitting in close proximity to one another. I don't know how many times I've gone to a library looking for one thing but ended up finding something much more interesting. Or to just go to the library with no end goal in mind...

Speaking as a junior, I’m happy to do this on my own (and do!). Conversations like this are always well intentioned and friction truly is super useful to learning. But the ‘…’ in these conversations seems to always be implicating that we should inject friction. There’s no need. I have peers who aren’t interested in learning at all. Adding friction to their process doesn’t force them to learn. Meanwhile adding frictio…

You're reading a lot into my ellipsis that isn't there. :-)

Please read it as: "who knows what you'll find if you take a stop by the library and just browse!"

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

#200
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…

Search is easily the best feature of AI/LLMs.

Which was trained on a pre-AI internet. What's going to happen in coming years when new tech comes out but perhaps isn't documented the same way anymore? It's not an unsolvable problem, but we could see unintended consequences like, say where you must pay the AI provider to ingest your data. Similar to buying poll space or AdSense or whatever they call it for search engines
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