> Is it possible to stay better than AI? Maybe for some people. Not for the average person.
I know we're talking broadly across all industries but I can only speak to what I know and am able to observe directly.
My opinion of the average software developer with a few years experience is not very high. Yet now that we have non-coders shipping features written with LLMs, and we're starting to observe the fallout from that, I'm getting closer to saying than an entry level coder is far better than an LLM (depending on how we evaluate "better").
There are also a lot of hidden costs associated with LLMs. For example, I'm spending a lot more time reviewing PRs than I used to. And we're taking a lot more time doing rework than we were before.
We can't yet say that LLMs have caused an increase in regressions, since we've been racing towards a major new version release, and so people are rushing in general and that skews the numbers. Over time, however, we'll have data on rate of bugs introduced before the widespread company adoption of LLMs vs after, controlled for crunch times as well.
If the average software developer only spends an average of 20% of their time actually writing code, then even if an LLM can offer an optimistic 50% productivity increase, then we're only optimizing for 10% best case scenario.
I think there is a lot of marketing-hype-driven ideology around "AI" right now that is leading a lot of people to buy into some of the overstated claims. This ideology may have companies genuinely slowing down their hiring of entry-levels at the moment, since some people are saying that an LLM is like having an incompetent intern. The business thinks "If you need to babysit a junior and you need to babysit an LLM, then why pay for the junior?" And we still need better data to determine if, on average, what a company pays for a junior is truly more expensive than delegating the work to an LLM + taking on the maintenance and review overhead. We don't have the answers yet. My personal bias has me thinking that on average a junior will provide higher returns although not necessarily immediately. The benefit of a junior is that they learn from mistakes and can adapt more readily to specific business requirements.
This is not to say that LLMs aren't valuable. I think the trade-off for entry-levels is that I would have killed to have something like Cursor when I was a a pre-teen teaching myself to code in the 90s. When you want to build something complicated and don't even know where to start, and LLM can get you some scaffolding and show you a basic strategy that you can build on. Then you go fix bugs and poke around and break stuff.. it's a great learning tool. So I expect that, over time, the talent of entry-levels will probably increase. In the short term, we need to get through this AI bubble and stabilize. Companies will learn where LLMs save costs and where they can still benefit from less-experienced coders. It will just take a bit of time.