AI is making junior devs useless • Hacker News Board

Re: AI is making junior devs useless

#351

Post by skeledrew » Mon, Mar 02, 2026, 1:55 PM UTC

somenameforme wrote: post #327

skeledrew wrote: post #324

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Conceptually, it's really not as hard as you make it seem. There are layers, but once you peel them away there's only one thing left, which all living things share: the drive to survive (maintain internal state parameters within a certain range by accessing nutrition, protection from environmental elements, security from other survival-seeking entities, reproduction to pass on genes, etc). No need to bring God/gods i…

Very little, certainly approximately 0%, of what humanity has done has been driven by base survival instincts. You're describing the process to mimic a roach, not a human.

You do work, don't you (or at least are in school)? Do you do it for sheer fun? Or to be able to afford things that allow you to survive?

Even those who do something like art "for fun" do it because it sates an internal need (not all actions need to make sense, because the inherent randomness of evolution is messy and leaves artifacts). Though also the desire to create some form of legacy can be considered a kind of survival: to be remembered by others beyond one's own lifespan.

Re: AI is making junior devs useless

#352

Post by bitfilped » Mon, Mar 02, 2026, 2:12 PM UTC

raw_anon_1111 wrote: post #186

ash_091 wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> statistically women all try to get into a relationship with the same 1% of men - who sleep around and cause toxicity all around. The remaining 99% become bitter and consequently... Are even less attractive to women. As a regular 30s dude, definitely not 1% by any measure, app dating had its rough spots but generally was a good time, I experienced no bitterness. Instead I met a bunch of interesting people and found…

For context, I don’t want this to sound bitter. The first time I was single as an adult was from 1996-2002 and dating apps weren’t a thing. The second time I was single was from 2006-2011 and I wasn’t really trying to date and spent most of the time getting my head back in the game and just hanging out with female friends until I started dating my now wife who I met at work. Even she had to make the first move. That…

Working on yourself extends faaaaar past just going to the gym.

Re: AI is making junior devs useless

#353

Post by freejazz » Mon, Mar 02, 2026, 2:18 PM UTC

skeledrew wrote: post #290

freejazz wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What needs do machines have? What desires do they have?

None, yet. But you can be 100% sure it's something we'll eventually succeed in adding, as it's through the guidance of desires and needs that intelligence really expresses.

Not sure how that follows but okay

Re: AI is making junior devs useless

#354

Post by bitfilped » Mon, Mar 02, 2026, 2:21 PM UTC

No company will expect (or even want) any employee to be using AI 5 years out with the exception of small specialized models that certainly won't be replacing any jobs. Idk what it is about people since covid... Tech bubbles aren't new, AI isn't new, moderate jumps in technolgy advancements isn't new. This whole scene of terrifying young practitioners as they're entering into their fields and telling students they are wasting their time and that all the jobs of the future will be gone isn't just silly, it's actively more destructive than the AI tech itself.

Re: AI is making junior devs useless

#355

Post by AndrewKemendo » Mon, Mar 02, 2026, 2:32 PM UTC

BobbyJo wrote: post #45

Junior devs have always been useless. You used to give them tasks that take them a week or two even though a senior engineer could do it in a couple hours, not because you wanted them to contribute, but because you wanted them to learn to contribute. The same ethos makes sense with AI, it's just that every company is trying to avoid paying that training tax. Why turn a junior into a senior yourself if you can get the…

Exactly this

Why train a junior human when I can train a junior robot that I can copy-paste that can’t quit and has infinite margins?

Re: AI is making junior devs useless

#356

Post by zenware » Mon, Mar 02, 2026, 2:48 PM UTC

nostrademons wrote: post #130

BobbyJo wrote: post #45

Junior devs have always been useless. You used to give them tasks that take them a week or two even though a senior engineer could do it in a couple hours, not because you wanted them to contribute, but because you wanted them to learn to contribute. The same ethos makes sense with AI, it's just that every company is trying to avoid paying that training tax. Why turn a junior into a senior yourself if you can get the…

It's interesting that the same dynamic is playing out on a much larger scale with children. A child is far more helpless than a junior engineer - at least a junior engineer can feed themselves, wipe their own butt, avoid destroying the room, and generally keep themselves alive. Everybody wants to offload the cost of raising children to parents, because the economic benefits aren't realized for 25+ years yet the costs…

That being said, a huge amount of the work being done (arguably all of it) is in support of humans. It would follow then that the more of us there are the more work is required, whereas if there were fewer of us less work is required. — I think the real concerns about birth-rate/population decline come from “borrowing against the future”, if that future never materializes then you cashed bad checks.

Re: AI is making junior devs useless

#357

Post by pluc » Mon, Mar 02, 2026, 2:58 PM UTC

fdgg wrote: post #286

pluc wrote: post #26

I can't wait until the AI people realize that without developers' original ideas, AI has nothing new to steal from. We don't create, AI will spit out the same old concepts. What, you're gonna create the next generation of AI by training it on what the very same AI has already produced? C'mon now. You don't get technical creativity reflexes by using AI. This is technical stagnation in the making. By cannibalizing its…

Hey man is there a private space where thinkers like you hang? Would like to join :) I wrote a similar post in this thread.

I don't know... but I'd rather mix in with the cultists. A dissenting opinion is important in their echo chamber if we're ever going to give sanity a chance.

Re: AI is making junior devs useless

#358

Post by pluc » Mon, Mar 02, 2026, 3:10 PM UTC

sunir wrote: post #170

hluska wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s the big scary point at the crux of all of this - you’ve had decades without the tooling to develop instincts. Nobody knows whether it’s possible to develop instincts with the tooling or what those instincts will look like. Creativity takes a degree of skill to execute on and the concern is that we’re potentially graduating people to painting the ceiling of the Sistine chapel before they’ve even learned to sket…

I can't repair my car, which used to be the hallmark of technical masculine skill in the era of Grease the musical, because mechanical maintenance is not primary in my lifetime. Nor do I have any idea how to manage a farm. I think the kids will be fine. On the other hand, I fear I will not survive once my Internet connection goes out.

That analogy brought another one to my mind: groceries.

We used to hunt and grow most of what we needed. For various reasons (good and bad) we are now completely removed from the whole process. That allowed us to prosper and evolve by focusing on other things. We took all of what we knew about growing/hunting, grouped it together with industrialization and abstracted it as "everything that happens before". It's a big shortcut - which is a big win for "other things" we may want to do.

AI is a lot like that. But the danger is that AI (or its dependencies - isn't Claude down this morning?) can disappear tomorrow, and then where does that leave us? It's as if all the animals and vegetation were controlled by OpenFoodstock.

I can't be the only one thinking we cannot let that happen.

Re: AI is making junior devs useless

#359

Post by dzonga » Mon, Mar 02, 2026, 3:17 PM UTC

keeda wrote: post #231

I maintain that in the future, any person wishing to learn any skill (not just coding!) will need to willingly eschew the use of AI when learning until they have "built the muscles". The literature is clear that repeated, hands-on practice is really the only way to build skills. I suspect the progression will be "No AI until intuition (whatever that is for that skill)" -> "Gradual use of AI to understand where it fal…

I also agree - however the ART of making software that's simple and works is disappearing fast.

One of the most impactful things in my career was watching Simple Made Easy by Rich Hickey

our industry is part engineering | part art (i.e having taste) - A.I doesn't have taste (hence why vibe coding) doesn't work - the art of engineering is reducing the amount of code you've to write

it's not about saying YES to every feature - but saying NO and shipping the most impactful feature in the smallest amount of time. sometimes it's about stepping back to relearn so you can do things the right way.

whereas AI is about producing the most amount of code possible - which is the very antithesis of Software Engineering

Re: AI is making junior devs useless

#360

Post by xyzzy123 » Mon, Mar 02, 2026, 3:35 PM UTC

dzonga wrote: post #359

keeda wrote: post #231

I maintain that in the future, any person wishing to learn any skill (not just coding!) will need to willingly eschew the use of AI when learning until they have "built the muscles". The literature is clear that repeated, hands-on practice is really the only way to build skills. I suspect the progression will be "No AI until intuition (whatever that is for that skill)" -> "Gradual use of AI to understand where it fal…

I also agree - however the ART of making software that's simple and works is disappearing fast. One of the most impactful things in my career was watching Simple Made Easy by Rich Hickey our industry is part engineering | part art (i.e having taste) - A.I doesn't have taste (hence why vibe coding) doesn't work - the art of engineering is reducing the amount of code you've to write it's not about saying YES to every f…

> the art of engineering is reducing the amount of code you've to write

I would argue that it's _scaling_ software development?

Making it so that you can create bigger programs: that accomodate more contributors, more requirements, faster, with more features, while being more correct, etc, without everything collapsing into spaghetti and chaos?

Historically, keeping a close eye on lines of code spent helped a lot along most axes. Finding ways to keep "code spent" down will remain very valuable but I don't think it's the _only_ way to scale?

Along the way we've developed architecture conventions, useful interfaces, test practices, standards, protocols, plugins & extension points, package repositories, etc. There are also social technologies like mailing lists, SIGs, bdfls, modern project & product management, etc etc.

To the extent that simplicity is measurable (less LoC spent, less code coupling, less cyclomatic complexity) it seems like it can be addressed as an optimisation problem and automated.