Move fast with AI, and break things, many, many things really fast
AWS CEO says replacing junior devs with AI is 'one of the dumbest ideas'
381–390 of 554 posts
Re: AWS CEO says replacing junior devs with AI is 'one of the dumbest ideas'
#382Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've learned a lot of shit while getting AI to give me the answers, because I wanted to understand why it did what it did. It saves me a lot of time trying to fix things that would have never worked, so I can just spend time analyzing success. There might be value in learning from failure, but my guess is that there's more value in learning from success, and if the LLM doesn't need me to succeed my time is better spe…
>I've learned a lot of shit while getting AI to give me the answers I would argue you're learning less than you might believe. Similarly to how people don't learn math by watching others solve problems, you're not going to learn to become a better engineer/problem solver by reading the output of ChatGPT.
If I know what I want to do and how I want to do it, and there's plumbing to make that a reality, am I not still solving problems? I'm just paying less attention to stuff that machines can successfully automate.
Regarding leveling up as an engineer, at this point in my career it's called management.
Re: AWS CEO says replacing junior devs with AI is 'one of the dumbest ideas'
#383The 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.
My Entire career
"Why the f*ck are you asking, you should know this"
or
"Why the f*ck can you not look that up"
edit: There's an entire chapter of the internet with "LMGTFY" responses because people ask questions.
or
"Isn't it f*cking obvious"
or
"Do I have to f*cking spell it out for you"
There's a strong chance that I am autistic, which means, yes, I need people to be (more) explicit.
AI has done a hell of a good job making it easier for me to search for subtexts that I typically miss. And I receive less of the negative feedback when I have something to ask that does help.
Re: AWS CEO says replacing junior devs with AI is 'one of the dumbest ideas'
#384Earlier quoted context omitted.
No, he’s saying that juniors, while having less experience ind development in general have more experience with AI tools . (This may be true broadly, certainly less experienced devs generally, IME, seem more enthusiastic about adopting and relying heavily on AI tooling.)
While, again, anyone can define words as they see fit, most people consider the "junior" and "senior" labels to apply to the activity being conducted, not something off to the side. As the job is to use AI tools, these most experienced people would be considered "seniors" by most. Nobody was ever suggesting that you should cut good help because they're juniors in knitting or dirt biking.
No, the job is to develop software. Using AI tools is one piece of the job. Having less experience with the job overall and more experience with one piece is a thing that happens.
Re: AWS CEO says replacing junior devs with AI is 'one of the dumbest ideas'
#385Relevant 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…
> the genie, used well, accelerates learning.
Ehh... 'used well' is doing some very heavy lifting there. And the incentive structure at 90% of companies does not optimize for 'using it well.'
The incentive is to ship quickly, meaning aim the AI-gun at the codebase for a few hours and grind out a "technically working" solution, with zero large-scale architecture thought and zero built-up knowledge of how the different parts of the application are intended to work together (because there was no "intention"). There will be tests, but they may not be sensible and may be very brittle.
Anyway, deploying a bunch of fresh grads armed not with good mentorship but with the ability to generate thousands of LOC a day is a recipe for accelerating the collapse I usually see in startup codebases about 6-8 years old. This is the point where the list of exceptions to every supposed pattern is longer than the list of things that follow the patterns, and where each bug, when properly pursued, leads to a long chain of past bad decisions, each of which would take days of effort to properly unwind (and that unwinding will also have a branching effect on other things). Also, coincidentally, this is the point where an AI agent is the most useless, because they really don't expect all the bizarre quirks in the codebase.
Am I saying AI is useless? No, it's great for prototyping and getting to PMF, and great in the hands of someone who can read its output with a critical eye, but I wouldn't combine it with inexperienced users who haven't had the opportunity to learn from all the many mistakes I've made over the years.
Re: AWS CEO says replacing junior devs with AI is 'one of the dumbest ideas'
#386I 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.
Perhaps, their own hiring pipeline is suffering, too. With most companies out there cutting internships and hiring of people with no experience "because AI will replace them" for the past 2-3 years we probably having a large dip in number of prospective candidates with 2-3 years of experience today.
Historically, these candidates have been the hiring sweet spot: less risky than brand new engineers, still small enough experience to efficiently mold them into your bespoke tools and processes and turn them into long-term employees, and still very cheap.
Re: AWS CEO says replacing junior devs with AI is 'one of the dumbest ideas'
#387Earlier quoted context omitted.
You can't give a junior tasks that require experience and nuance that have been acquired over years of development. If you babysit them, then perhaps but then what is the point? By it's nature "nuance" is something hard to describe concretely but as someone who has mentored a fair few juniors most of them don't have it. AI generally doesn't have it either. Juniors need tasks at the boundary of their capability, but n…
you work(ed) in some shitty places if you believe this to be true
Perhaps, I don't consider them shitty myself but palates differ. Is engineering nirvana a place where tasks are such that any can been done by a junior engineer, and the concept of engineering skill developed through experience is non-existent?
Re: AWS CEO says replacing junior devs with AI is 'one of the dumbest ideas'
#388> “Number one, my experience is that many of the most junior folks are actually the most experienced with the AI tools. So they're actually most able to get the most out of them.”
Would that experience be from cheating on their homework? Are you sure that's the skill you want to prioritize?
> “Number two, they're usually the least expensive because they're right out of college, and they generally make less. So if you're thinking about cost optimization, they're not the only people you would want to optimize around.”
Hahaha. Sounds like a threat. Additional context for this is that Amazon has a history of stack ranking and per-manager culling quotas, and not as much a reputation for caring about employees like Google did.
> “Three, at some point, that whole thing explodes on itself. If you have no talent pipeline that you're building and no junior people that you're mentoring and bringing up through the company, we often find that that's where we get some of the best ideas.”
I thought the tech industry had given up on training and investing in juniors for long-term, since (the thinking goes) most of them will job-hop in 18 months, no matter how well you nurture. Instead, most companies are hiring for the near-term productivity they can get, very transactionally.
Does AWS have good long-term retention of software engineers?
Re: AWS CEO says replacing junior devs with AI is 'one of the dumbest ideas'
#389Earlier 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…
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Re: AWS CEO says replacing junior devs with AI is 'one of the dumbest ideas'
#390Earlier quoted context omitted.
"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.
Think of highly competitive environments where looking foolish can be weaponised against you. They definitely exist here (my experience in UK and Australia)
My entire career - New Zealand, and Australia - asking questions is weaponised (as I stated above)
Graduate, Junior, Senior, Team Lead, - my title hasn't mattered to the response