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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'

#241

Post by throwway120385 »

deepGem wrote: post #235
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 - nea…

Why would Claude code help you find unused features? The end customer uses features, not the AI. I would want to know from the end customer whether a feature is unused, and a Junior with an LLM assistant is not going to be able to tell me that without adding new features to the code base.

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

#242

Post by [deleted] »

rsanek wrote: post #226
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…

"without losing face"? What culture are you referring to? The Western companies I have worked at do not discourage such questions -- in fact, it's often the sign of someone very senior when they ask a seemingly 'dumb' question that others have taken for granted.

[deleted]

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

#243

Post by giancarlostoro »

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…

> They’re the only people in the org who are still allowed to ask “dumb” questions without losing face

I strongly disagree, a Senior who cannot ask a "dumb question" is a useless developer to me. Ask away, we want to figure things out, we're not mind readers. Every good senior developer I know asks questions and admits when they don't know things. This is humility and in my eyes is a strong market for a good Senior Developer. The entire point of our job is to ask questions (to ourselves typically the most) and figure out the answers (the code).

Juniors could or should ask more questions, and by the time you're a Senior, you're asking key questions no matter how dumb they sound.

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

#244

Post by amrocha »

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 disagree. In my experience AI does most of the work and the juniors already poor skills atrophy. Then a senior engineer has to review AI slop and tell the junior to roll the AI dice again.

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

#245

Post by andrewmutz »

rsanek wrote: post #226
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…

"without losing face"? What culture are you referring to? The Western companies I have worked at do not discourage such questions -- in fact, it's often the sign of someone very senior when they ask a seemingly 'dumb' question that others have taken for granted.

Completely agree with this. I got to work closely with an IBM fellow one summer and I was impressed by his willingness to ask "dumb questions" in meetings. Sometimes he was just out of the loop but more often he was just questioning some of the assumptions that others in the room had left unquestioned.

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

#246

Post by Cpoll »

Aurornis wrote: post #183
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...

I recall similar arguments being made against search engines: People who had built up a library of internal knowledge about where and how to find things didn't like that it had become so easy to search for resources. The arguments were similar, too: What will you do if Google goes down? What if Google gives the wrong answer? What if you become dependent on Google? Yet I'm willing to bet that everyone reading this use…

It's possible those arguments are correct. I wouldn't give up Google and SO, but I suspect I was learning faster when my first stop was K&R or a man page. There's a lot of benefit in building your own library of knowledge instead of cribbing from someone else's.

Of course no-one's stopping a junior from doing it the old way, but no-one's teaching them they can, either.

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

#247

Post by nevir »

Juniors are also more likely to be the MOST proficient/comfortable with AI tooling.

Pair them with a senior so they can learn engineering best practices:

And now you've also just given your senior engineers some extra experience/insights into how to more effectively leverage AI.

It accelerates the org to have juniors (really: a good mix of all experience levels)

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

#249

Post by amrocha »

supersour wrote: post #143
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...

I think if this were true, then individualized mastery learning wouldn't prove to be so effective https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mastery_learning

Except none of us have a master teaching and verifying our knowledge on how to use a library. And AI doesn’t do that either.

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

#250

Post by frtime2025 »

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…

AI will replace jobs. People are putting their IT/dev budget into something, which means something else will be cut.

I also don’t believe juniors, kids, seniors, staff, principals, distinguished/fellow should be replaced by AI. I think they WILL be, but they shouldn’t be. AI at Gemini 3 Flash / Claude Opus 4.5 level is capable with help and review of doing a lot of what a lot of devs do currently. It can’t do everything and will fail, but if the business doesn’t care, they’ll cut jobs.

Don’t waste time trying to argue against AI to attempt to save your job. Just learn AI and do your job until you’re no longer needed to even manage it. Or, if you don’t want to, do something else.

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