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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'

#411

Post by TheGRS »

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 don't agree that this is the central value juniors provide. Its a nice tertiary value, but not why one hires them. I think the value is the later part of farming for new talent and just growing your team.

I still think the central issue is the economy. There are more seniors available to fill roles, so filling out junior roles is less desirable. And perhaps "replacing juniors with AI" is just the industry's way of clumsily saving face.

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

#412

Post by zahlman »

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…

Not to disagree with Kent Beck's insights on juniors using AI, but the effect of AI on his own writing is palpably negative. His older content is much more enjoyable to read. And so is his recent non-post "activity" on Substack. For example, compare a "note" preceding this article (https://substack.com/@kentbeck/note/c-188541464), on the same topic, to the actual content.

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

#413

Post by citizenpaul »

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…

The real thing people miss is not AI replacing Juniors. Its that senior management soured on hiring juniors even a few years before AI, almost across all industries.

AI is now just the scapegoat for an economy wide problem. Execs found "one neat trick", piling junior work on seniors until they quit. While not hiring replacements in order to goose short term profits. Now every company is in the same position where hiring a senior really means hiring 5 seniors to replace the one that had 5 jobs layered on over a few years. This is of course impossible for any mortal to jump into. Now they also dont even have juniors to train up to senior levels.

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

#416

Post by zahlman »

9rx wrote: post #377
dragonwriter wrote: post #368

Earlier 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.

> As the job is to use AI tools

Aside from the absurdity of this claim, consider how many years of experience a "senior" is typically expected to have, and then consider how long even ChatGPT has been available to the public, never mind SOTA coding agents.

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

#417

Post by [deleted] »

fastball wrote: post #409
almosthere wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

[deleted]

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

#418

Post by zahlman »

pnathan wrote: post #101

I - senior - can patch an application in an unknown language and framework with the AI. I know enough to tell it to stop the wildly stupid ideas. But I don't learn. That's not what I'm trying to do- I'm trying to fix the bug. Hmm. I'm pretty sure AI is going to lead us to a deskilling crash. Food for thought.

> But I don't learn. That's not what I'm trying to do- I'm trying to fix the bug. Hmm. I'm pretty sure AI is going to lead us to a deskilling crash.

Nothing is preventing you from studying how the bugfix works once it's in place.

Nor is there any reason this use of AI should cause you to lose skills you already have.

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

#419

Post by KnuthIsGod »

Team at a bank I know went from 13 members to 2. The remaining two are likely to be outsourced. They are trying to transition to the business side.

Folks in Hyderabad can run LLMs too and data centre and infrastructure costs are lower in India.

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

#420

Post by golly_ned »

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…

> Instead of spending three hours figuring out which API to use, they spend twenty minutes evaluating options the AI surfaced

This really isn't the case from what I've seen. It's that they use Cursor or other code generation tools integrated into their development environment to generate code, and if it's functional and looks from a fuzzy distance like 'good' code (in the 'code in the small' sense), they send an oversized PR, and it's up to the reviewer to actually do the thinking.

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