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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'

#471

Post by never_inline »

flyinglizard wrote: post #359
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…

Good juniors are also great at just working. Usually no family so they are able to put in a lot of attention into work and they have that innocent curiosity and can-do in them which brings a lot of positive energy.

> put in a lot of attention into work and they have that innocent curiosity

They're also good at putting company code into ChatGPT.

/snark

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

#473

Post by kachapopopow »

I think the bigger problem is that if you elimitate jr devs you kind of just extend the amount of time in college required - effectively requiring to roleplay being in a real company doing real jobs until you gain the experience to go straight into a more senior job, but I mean doctors have relitively the same problem where there is no such thing as entry level because when you are responsible for human lives anything other than a senior role is often not enough.

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

#474

Post by versteegen »

imiric wrote: post #233
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…

I'm not swayed by appeals to authority, but this is a supremely bad take. "AI" tools are most useful in the hands of experienced developers, not juniors. It's seniors who have the knowledge and capability to review the generated output, and decide whether the code will cause more issues when it's merged, or if it's usable if they tweak and adapt it in certain ways. A junior developer has no such skills. Their only ap…

> A junior developer has no such skills. Their only approach will be to run the code, test whether it fulfills the requirements, and, if they're thorough, try to understand and test it to the best of their abilities.

This is also a supremely bad take... well, really it's mainly the way you worded it that's bad. Juniors have skills, natural aptitudes, as much intelligence on average as other programmers, and often even some experience but what they lack is work history. They sure as hell are capable of understanding code rather than just running it. Yes, of course experience is immensely useful, most especially at understanding how to achieve a maintainable and reliable codebase in the longterm, which is obviously of special importance, but long experience is not a hard requirement. You can reason about trade offs, learn from advice, learn quickly, etc.

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

#475

Post by nothrabannosir »

simonw wrote: post #260
gosub100 wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which was trained on a pre-AI internet. What's going to happen in coming years when new tech comes out but perhaps isn't documented the same way anymore? It's not an unsolvable problem, but we could see unintended consequences like, say where you must pay the AI provider to ingest your data. Similar to buying poll space or AdSense or whatever they call it for search engines

If you release a new piece of technology from 2025 onwards and don't invest a decent amount of effort into producing LLM-friendly documentation (with good examples) that a user can slurp into their coding agent you're doing your new technology a disservice.

I thought this was always true? What’s new about documentation being important?

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

#477

Post by kyralis »

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...

As a staff engineer at FAANG... tell me you've never worked at FAANG without telling me you've never worked at FAANG.

I've given talks on work/life balance -- and I stand by those talks enough to argue with directors and above when needed, though it rarely is -- and an important part of that talk is about how much better it can look when you can intelligently describe the limits of your knowledge, skills, and estimation.

If you get penalized for that, you're just in a shit role with a shit manager. Don't project that on the rest of us.

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

#478

Post by simonw »

nothrabannosir wrote: post #475
simonw wrote: post #260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you release a new piece of technology from 2025 onwards and don't invest a decent amount of effort into producing LLM-friendly documentation (with good examples) that a user can slurp into their coding agent you're doing your new technology a disservice.

I thought this was always true? What’s new about documentation being important?

If your technology has competition that's already in the training data, the only way to make it equally accessible to LLM users is to ensure there is concise, available documentation that can be fed directly into those LLMs.

That's why "copy page" buttons are increasingly showing on manual pages eg. https://platform.claude.com/docs/en/get-started

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

#479

Post by kyralis »

lkjdsklf wrote: post #351
47928485 wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 at a couple FAANG and questioning things is pretty much always viewed as a positive when it’s done in a productive and professional manner What isn’t viewed positively is when you refuse to accept a decision after it’s been made and your concerns have been heard. People get pissed if you keep relitigating the same points over and over again

My advice to engineer is always:

Your job is to make sure that the decision makers, when they're not you, have the information needed to make competent decisions. You should keep arguing when (a) there is credible reason to believe that important information has not been heard or understood or (b) when new information has come to light that you credibly believe might change the decision. In the absence of those two, your should accept that you have done your job and should let your managers to theirs, even if you disagree with them. Bring it back up when (a) or (b) changes, and not until.

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

#480

Post by never_inline »

lokar wrote: post #64
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…

For an experienced engineer, working out the syntax, APIs, type issues, understanding errors, etc is the easy part of the job. Larger picture issues are the real task. But for many Jr engineers it’s the hard part. They are not (yet) expected to be responsible for the larger issues.

When I joined I could do all this.
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