Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

finalroundai.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

231–240 of 554 posts

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

#231

Post by ebiester »

alexgotoi wrote: post #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 r…

So, I think there are two models.

One is a "one junior per team" model. I endorse this for exactly the reasons you speak.

Another, as I recently saw, was a 70/30 model of juniors to seniors. You make your seniors as task delegators and put all implementation on the junior developers. This puts an "up or out" pressure and gives very little mentorship opportunities. if 70% of your engineers are under 4 years of experience, it can be a rough go.

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

#232

Post by ebiester »

47928485 wrote: post #211
tyre wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a really good and under appreciated point. My recommendation to mid-level, senior, and staff engineers is to keep questioning decisions and create a culture where that’s encouraged. Junior devs do that naturally (if you have the culture) because they don’t know anything already. It’s great

> My recommendation to mid-level, senior, and staff engineers is to keep questioning decisions and create a culture where that’s encouraged. Tell me you've never worked at FAANG without telling me you've never worked at FAANG...

Some of us intentionally avoid FAANG for that reason.

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

#233

Post by imiric »

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…

I'm not swayed by appeals to authority, but this is a supremely bad take.

"AI" tools are most useful in the hands of experienced developers, not juniors. It's seniors who have the knowledge and capability to review the generated output, and decide whether the code will cause more issues when it's merged, or if it's usable if they tweak and adapt it in certain ways.

A junior developer has no such skills. Their only approach will be to run the code, test whether it fulfills the requirements, and, if they're thorough, try to understand and test it to the best of their abilities. Chances are that because they're pressured to deliver as quickly as possible to impress their colleagues and managers, they'll just accept whatever working solution the tool produces the first time.

This makes "AI" in the hands of junior developers risky and counterproductive. Companies that allow this type of development will quickly grind to a halt under the weight of technical debt, and a minefield of bugs they won't know how to maneuver around.

The unfortunate reality is that with "AI" there is no pathway for junior developers to become senior. Most people will gravitate towards using these tools as a crutch for quickly generating software, and not as a learning tool to improve their own skills. This should concern everyone vested in the future of this industry.

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

#234

Post by codegeek »

symlinkk wrote: post #224
codegeek wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My take is that these are not binary issues. With outsourcing, it is true that you can hire someone cheaper in Asian countries but it cannot kill all jobs locally. So what happens is that the absolute average/mediocre get replaced by outsourcing and now with AI while the top talent can still command a good salary because they are worth it. So I think that a lot of juniors WILL get replaced by AI not because they are…

If you have to be “top talent” to survive it’s not a good field to get into anymore.

To survive against Outsourcing/cheaper labor and AI, I would agree.

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

#235

Post by deepGem »

alexgotoi wrote: post #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 r…

What will eventually pan out is that senior devs will be replaced with junior devs powered by AI assistants. Simply because of the reasons you stated. They will ask the dumb important questions and then after a while, will even solve for them.

Now that their minds are free from routine and boilerplate work, they will start asking more 'whys' which will be very good for the organization overall.

Take any product - nearly 50% of the features are unused and it's a genuine engineering waste to maintain those features. A junior dev spending 3 months on the code base with Claude code will figure out these hidden unwanted features, cull them or ask them to be culled.

It'll take a while to navigate the hierarchy but they'll figure it out. The old guard will have no option but to move up or move out.

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

#236

Post by iwontberude »

47928485 wrote: post #211
tyre wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a really good and under appreciated point. My recommendation to mid-level, senior, and staff engineers is to keep questioning decisions and create a culture where that’s encouraged. Junior devs do that naturally (if you have the culture) because they don’t know anything already. It’s great

> My recommendation to mid-level, senior, and staff engineers is to keep questioning decisions and create a culture where that’s encouraged. Tell me you've never worked at FAANG without telling me you've never worked at FAANG...

Usually the people who question decisions are shot down because they don’t have a wholistic understanding of the decision and (respectfully) don’t have good arguments. This is only because they are focused on some narrow aspect of the business which distorts or reduces their visibility and understanding.

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

#237

Post by otabdeveloper4 »

XenophileJKO wrote: post #57
twelvechess wrote: post #22

Most of the apps that I use regularly fail at least once a day nowadays. I think this is a direct cause of putting AI code in production without reviewing/QA.

My prediction is that this will actually get better, because the cost to find and fix with AI is so much lower in time investment.

AI doesn't ever fix anything, it just breaks stuff and adds technical debt.

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

#238

Post by aerhardt »

alexgotoi wrote: post #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 r…

I mean, that’s an interesting take, but “having people around to ask dumb questions” is not why most orgs hire juniors.

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

#240

Post by sailfast »

__s wrote: post #122
codegeek wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"BUT I see juniors often are the ones who actually understand AI tools better than seniors" Sorry, what does that mean exactly ? Are you claiming that a junior dev knows how to ask the right prompts better than a Senior dev ?

Their implication is that junior devs have more likely built up their workflow around the use of AI tooling, likely because if they're younger they'll have had more plasticity in their process to adapt AI tooling Overall I don't quite agree. Personally this applies to me, I've been using vim for the last decade so any AI tooling that wants me to run some electron app is a non starter. But many of my senior peers comi…

All the major players offer a CLI, for what it’s worth.

You won’t need Vim except to review changes and tweak some things if you feel like it.

Post reply on HN