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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'

#321

Post by seanmcdirmid »

lifeformed wrote: post #225
seanmcdirmid wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1965: learning how to punch your own punch cards is part of the learning process 1995: struggling with docs and learning how and where to find the answers part of the learning process 2005: struggling with stackoverflow and learning how to find answers to questions that others have asked before quickly is part of the learning process 2015: using search to find answers is part of the learning process 2025: using AI to…

Has the quality of software been improving all this time?

The volume of software that we have produced with new tools has increased dramatically. The quality has remained at a level that the market can accept (and it doesn't want to bother paying for more quality for the cost of it).

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

#322

Post by jorvi »

marcosdumay wrote: post #303
jorvi wrote: post #257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That second model is basically the hospital model. You have 1 veteran doctor overseeing 4 learning doctors. For example operating rooms do this, where they will have 4 operating rooms with 4 less experienced anesthesist and then 1 very experienced anesthesist who will rotate between the 4 and is on call for when shit hits the fan. Honestly I think everyone here is missing the forest for the trees. Juniors their main…

I guess Peopleware couldn't get every single thing right. A hospital model may be a good idea. One where you have a senior programmer and many junior ones doing most tasks isn't. IMO, something closer to a real hospital team, where you have experts of different disciplines, and maybe a couple of juniors composing the team has much higher chances of success.

> something closer to a real hospital team, where you have experts of different disciplines

That is not how hospitals work. The surgery departement won't have a crack team of different disciplines to teach budding surgeons everything. They'll only have veteran surgeons to guide less-experienced surgeons.

What you will have is interdepartmental cooperation / hand-off, and you'll have multi-discipline roles like surgical oncologist.

In the same way, you won't have devops seniors training front-end juniors.

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

#323

Post by bgwalter »

switchbak wrote: post #307
bgwalter wrote: post #294

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, that wasn't the question.

When you're so out of touch as to not know who Kent Beck is, these questions hardly matter. The thrust of the issue is that: when used suitably, AI tools can increase the rate of learning such that it changes the economics of investments in juniour developers - in a good way, to the contrary of how these tools have been discussed in the mainstream. That is an interesting take, and worthy of discussion. Your appeal to…

I know who Kent Beck is and I'm not impressed by Agile and Extreme Programming.

What I did not know and what the Wikipedia page revealed is that he worked for a YCombinator company. Thus the downvotes.

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

#324

Post by mrcsharp »

kunley wrote: post #285

Btw, it's funny that certain kind of people tend to believe in common sense only when it comes from the mouth of the AWS CEO or a similar persona, and one can be ridiculed when saying the same thing as an anynomous commenter.

It's always been this way with any hype cycle. This one is just the latest iteration.

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

#325

Post by HeavyStorm »

Thank God someone still has a functioning brain.

You should replace devs vertically, not horizontally, otherwise, who'll be you senior dev tomorrow?

Jokes aside, AI has the potential to reduce workforce across the board, but companies should strive to retain all levels staffed with humans. Also, an LLM can't fully replace even a junior, not yet at least.

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

#326

Post by bonzini »

ravenstine wrote: post #115
frostiness wrote: post #17

I can't help but feel this is backpedaling after the AI hype led to people entering university avoiding computer science or those already in changing their major. Ultimately we might end up with a shortage of developers again, which would be amusing.

Can anyone really blame the students? If I were in their shoes, I probably wouldn't bother studying CS right now. From their perspective, it doesn't really matter whether AI is bullshit in any capacity; it matters whether businesses who are buying the AI hype are going to hire you or not. Hell, I should probably be studying how to be a carpenter given the level at which companies are pushing vibe coding on their engi…

Three-four years is a lot of time for these companies to face the harsh reality.

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

#327

Post by HeavyStorm »

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 sense a lot of hate/baggage in this post subtext.

Really, juniors are only important because they ask "dumb" questions that can help remove useless abstractions? That your take?

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

#328

Post by marcosdumay »

jorvi wrote: post #322
marcosdumay wrote: post #303

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I guess Peopleware couldn't get every single thing right. A hospital model may be a good idea. One where you have a senior programmer and many junior ones doing most tasks isn't. IMO, something closer to a real hospital team, where you have experts of different disciplines, and maybe a couple of juniors composing the team has much higher chances of success.

> something closer to a real hospital team, where you have experts of different disciplines That is not how hospitals work. The surgery departement won't have a crack team of different disciplines to teach budding surgeons everything. They'll only have veteran surgeons to guide less-experienced surgeons. What you will have is interdepartmental cooperation / hand-off, and you'll have multi-discipline roles like surgic…

A surgery team has a surgeon an anesthesiologist, a nurse specialized on material handling overseeing the material usage in the procedure, maybe a nurse specialized on equipment handling. None of those people are junior or subordinated to the others.

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

#329

Post by baxtr »

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.

I am bit more senior nowadays.

Whenever I don’t understand something I say something like: "Uh, I’m probably the only one here, but I don’t get it…"

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

#330

Post by snarf21 »

amrocha wrote: post #244
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.

Agreed, this is like AI doing your homework. A select few will use it to learn but most will copy/pasta, let it create their PR and slack the rest of the day. But at least they are "trying" so they won't get fired. And it requires strong senior engineers to walk them through the changes they are trying to check in and see why they chose them.
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