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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'

#401

Post by welliebobs »

Do we really think that we're going to see all developers morph into one archetype where we all have exactly the same effective skills? Many engineers already have an area of interest where they focus, be that performance optimisation or high level architecture.

It's my prediction that we're going to see more specialised skill sets become more commonplace. We'll have developers who can effectively use AI to bootstrap PoC's, developers who use AI in well established code bases to increase velocity (think asking Cursor to implement another set of REST endpoints for a new type), and developers who might choose to exclude AI from their workflows.

Eventually (I hope, at least) it'll be expected that it's another tool that developers can use in their day to day and less of the Omnissiah that has come to replace us as developers.

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

#402

Post by jamblewamble »

awesome_dude wrote: post #383
rsanek wrote: post #226

Earlier 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.

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 j…

Asking questions is a good thing but that doesnt mean ALL questions. It doesnt include questions you could answer with a google search or by reading documentation, obviously.

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

#403

Post by tetha »

ebiester wrote: post #231
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…

So, I think there are two models. One is a "one junior per team" model. I endorse this for exactly the reasons you speak. Another, as I recently saw, was a 70/30 model of juniors to seniors. You make your seniors as task delegators and put all implementation on the junior developers. This puts an "up or out" pressure and gives very little mentorship opportunities. if 70% of your engineers are under 4 years of experie…

In my operational team, I'm following a third model, inspired by german trade workers. You have juniors, journeymen and masters. Juniors are generally clueless and need to be told what to do, specifically. This is very much the level of "Here are 28 marks that needs bolts placed in concrete, make it so, I can explain why". Journeymen should be figuring out a plan how to solve a project and challenge it with the master to see if it fits the quality requirements of the master.

And practically, you can have one or two journeymen per master. However, these 2-3 people can in turn support 3-4 more juniors to supply useful work.

This also establishes a fairly natural growth of a person within the company. First you do standard things as told. Then you start doing projects that mostly follow a standard that has worked in the past. And then you start standardizing projects.

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

#404

Post by awesome_dude »

jamblewamble wrote: post #402
awesome_dude wrote: post #383

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 j…

Asking questions is a good thing but that doesnt mean ALL questions. It doesnt include questions you could answer with a google search or by reading documentation, obviously.

Got it - ask questions, but not ones that you already know where the answer is.

edit: well, except when you search the documentation and get (literally) 70+ results because you don't know the exact phrasing used in the self hosted wiki...

Or, when it's a question that is domain specific (meaning that the SME is supposed to know it, which you only know if you are... an SME...)

etc

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

#405

Post by ben_w »

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.

Company culture != national culture != personal culture. Such things can be all over the place.

I've worked with people from Korea who took me 100% seriously when I said the architecture was too complex and hard to work with slowing down velocity, and although they did end up keeping it there was no outward indication of lost face and they did put in the effort to justify their thinking.

I've also worked with some British, Greek, and Russian people who were completely unwilling to listen to any feedback from coworkers, only order them around.

Even within a person: I know a self-identified communist, who is very open minded about anything except politics.

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

#406

Post by ay »

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.

Reading this article is especially amusing since this bit just hit the news as well:

https://www.business-standard.com/amp/world-news/amazon-euro...

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

#407

Post by jauer »

47928485 wrote: post #211
tyre wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a really good and under appreciated point. My recommendation to mid-level, senior, and staff engineers is to keep questioning decisions and create a culture where that’s encouraged. Junior devs do that naturally (if you have the culture) because they don’t know anything already. It’s great

> My recommendation to mid-level, senior, and staff engineers is to keep questioning decisions and create a culture where that’s encouraged. Tell me you've never worked at FAANG without telling me you've never worked at FAANG...

I've worked in various teams on the infrastructure side of a FAANG from early career/L4 to sr staff eng/L7 and have always been encouraged and rewarded for asking questions, even when those questions have led to unexpected multimillion dollar costs and in one case a loss of ~1% of fleetwide compute capacity.

I think this comes down to how you go about asking. You have to take the time to understand what is and how it's seen by others by being curious, reading docs, etc instead of rolling in making assertions disguised as questions to assert authority like so many are wont to do.

I suppose it's possible that I'm the designated court jester and that's why I can get away with questioning, but I don't think that's the case :)

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

#409

Post by fastball »

almosthere wrote: post #63
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…

We had 3 interns this past summer - with AI I would say they were VERY capable of generating results quickly. Some of the code and assumptions were not great, but it did help us push out some releases quickly to alleviate customer issues. So there is a tradeoff with juniors. May help quickly get features out, may also need some refactoring later.

What makes them more capable than a senior engineer with three LLM agents?

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

#410

Post by deepGem »

throwway120385 wrote: post #241
deepGem wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What will eventually pan out is that senior devs will be replaced with junior devs powered by AI assistants. Simply because of the reasons you stated. They will ask the dumb important questions and then after a while, will even solve for them. Now that their minds are free from routine and boilerplate work, they will start asking more 'whys' which will be very good for the organization overall. Take any product - nea…

Why would Claude code help you find unused features? The end customer uses features, not the AI. I would want to know from the end customer whether a feature is unused, and a Junior with an LLM assistant is not going to be able to tell me that without adding new features to the code base.

Am using Claude code as an approximation here. 2 years down the line the tooling around analytics will get integrated in AU assistants and they will be absolutely able to figure out unused features.
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