The ladder is missing rungs – Engineering Progression When AI Ate the Middle

Give juniors local models and plan for a workflow that soesnt require subsidized compute with lockib.

I agree that the way that today's generation of seasoned programmers learned their craft is going away, and that we don't know how the next generation will learn. I disagree very much with the conclusion:

> They didn’t trade speed for learning. They traded learning for nothing. There was no trade-off. There was just loss.

I believe this conclusion is due to a methodological problem, a form of begging the question if you will. One thing I am certain of is that humans who set their mind to something learn something, and good programmers are among the most tenacious in setting their mind to something. With agentic coding, they definitely learn different things, and so I would expect syntax knowledge to be weaker, but debugging and review skill will increase overall. Why? Because there will be more code, and more breakage, and I still haven't seen any tooling that allows a non-technical person to be effective at this.

Programming knowledge has always had a half-life. The way I see it, this is a big sea change that will fundamentally change the job of software engineers, and some non-trivial percentage will either change careers or find a sheltered slow-moving place to finish out their working years. But for those who were not attached to hand-crafted code, AI provides power tools that empower technically minded people more than anyone else. I have full faith that younger generation still has the same distribution of technical potential, and they will still find ways to develop their craft just as previous generations of hackers have always done.

We hired on a software engineer fresh out of college this January, and we are a very claude heavy shop. We have noticed and have explained to him that we still have to do the real engineering work: requirements decomposition, interface design, verification and integration. Claude is helpful but he is still responsible for his output. He’s been doing well so far! Theres still plenty of things for him to bang his head on and grow.

Digital technology has been gutting other fields for decades. For a few examples, we have lost the ladder that trained people as Linotype Operators/Typesetters, Photographic Lab Technicians, Legal Research Associates, Dictation Typists and Stenographers, etc. All which could lead to higher skilled and higher paid jobs.

We didn't care until the same process came knocking on the door for us.

MBA! lol

We've actually been here before with higher languages. Assembly is actually a higher language, performance is much worse than machine code. It cant really self modify or do code generation. To squeeze all of the wine from the rock you do need 100 times more effort. C is luxurious compared to assembly. Python is even more productive. We don't use html/css/javascript because it is so fast, it's gawd aweful slow. I can however get something up and available to the world in less than a minute.

Then we pretend to be optimizing our websites for performance but we have no idea what code is triggered by our instructions. If the button responds in 0.2 seconds we are good. You know, the time it takes for the cpu to do 1-2 trillion instructions?

We already are MBA's!