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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'

#341

Post by bigfishrunning »

psunavy03 wrote: post #133
bgwalter wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How would a person who describes himself as a "full time content producer" know what is actually going on in the industry? https://substack.com/@kentbeck What software projects is he actively working on?

The dude literally invented Extreme Programming and was the first signer of the Agile Manifesto. He's forgotten more about software development than most people on this site ever knew.

Seems to me that his core competency is in managing a software team, not developing software.

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

#342

Post by Waterluvian »

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…

That's a perplexing take based on how I've experienced the past 15 years: the more senior someone is, the more questions they tend to ask.

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

#343

Post by user3939382 »

bespokedevelopr wrote: post #316

Some of my friends who are senior/staff engs at various fang companies are basically convinced their jobs are at risk over the next few years due to how good the llms have gotten this year. I switched over to consulting/contracting so I don’t have the visibility like they do, but my work is heavily dependent on llms. However I don’t see it wiping out the industry but rather making people more efficient. They have muc…

If you’re a master of the syntax fog you’re done. If you understand computation from first principles to tcp frames and transformer architecture you’re golden.

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

#344

Post by epolanski »

tayo42 wrote: post #153
epolanski wrote: post #96

My experience is that juniors have an easier time to ramp up, but never get better at proper engineering (analysis) and development processes (debug). They also struggle to read and review code. I fear that unless you heavily invest in them and follow them, they might be condemned to have decades of junior experience.

> but never get better at proper engineering (analysis) and development processes (debug). They also struggle to read and review code. You can describe pre-ai developers and like that too. It's probably my biggest complaint about some of my Co workers

To some extend, you're right, but I'd still say that pre AI you had to at some point to write some notes, come with a plan and read more code.

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

#345

Post by pests »

ChuckMcM wrote: post #210
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…

And this is always my question: "... because the genie, used well, accelerates learning." Does it though? How are we defining "learning" here? The example I like to use is that a student who "learns" what a square root is, can calculate the square root of a number on a simple 4 function calculator (x, ÷, +, -) if iteratively. Whereas the student who "learns" that the √ key gives them the square root, is "stuck" when…

Some random musings this reminded me of.

I graduated HS in mid 2000s and didn't start using a calculator for math classes until basically a junior in college. I would do every calculation by hand, on paper. I benefited from a great math teacher early on that taught me how to properly lay out my calculations and solutions on paper. I've had tests I've turned in where I spent more paper on a single question than others did on the entire test.

It really helped my understanding of numbers and how they interacted, and helped teachers/professors narrow down on my misunderstandings.

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

#347

Post by Spooky23 »

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.

There are a lot of bad places to work, and those are the types of places that do things like replace junior devs with AI.

The place I work at is in the middle of a new CEO’s process of breaking the company. The company can’t go out of business, but we’ll set stuff on fire for another 12-18 months.

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

#348

Post by benjismith »

I think the biggest injury to the hiring of junior devs happened after COVID made remote-work ubiquitous. It's a lot harder for a junior dev to get real mentorship, including the ambient kind of mentorship-by-osmosis, when everyone works alone in a sad dark room in their basement, rather than in an office with their peers and mentors.

The advent of agentic coding is probably punch #2 in the one-two punch against juniors, but it's an extension of a pattern that's been unfolding for probably 5+ years now.

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

#349

Post by pnathan »

PaulStatezny wrote: post #317
BeFlatXIII wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On the other hand, if it's a one-off, you'll have forgotten what you learned by the time you'd need to use that skill again.

But without AI, there are neural connections formed while determining the correct one-off solution. The neural connections (or lack of them) have longer term comprehension-building implications.

This is it. Otherwise I'd know more about $that_technology than I would otherwise.
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