So he's saying we should be replacing the seniors with fresh grads who are good at using AI tools? Not a surprising take, given Amazon's turnover rate.
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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'
#92Most of the apps that I use regularly fail at least once a day nowadays. I think this is a direct cause of putting AI code in production without reviewing/QA.
My prediction is that this will actually get better, because the cost to find and fix with AI is so much lower in time investment.
The problem is human, not technical. Companies and managers need to start caring about the details instead of crossing items off a list. Until we see that culture shift in the industry, which might never happen, AI isn't going to help—if anything, it'll make the problem worse as devs rush to deliver on arbitrary deadlines.
Re: AWS CEO says replacing junior devs with AI is 'one of the dumbest ideas'
#93I 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.
"after the AI hype led to people entering university avoiding computer science or those already in changing their major"
That's such a terrible trend.
Reminds me of my peers back in ~2001 who opted not to take a computer science degree even though they loved programming because they thought all the software engineering jobs would be outsourced to countries like India and there wouldn't be any career opportunities for them. A very expensive mistake!
Re: AWS CEO says replacing junior devs with AI is 'one of the dumbest ideas'
#94Earlier quoted context omitted.
They're trying really hard to make sure you know they didn't write their post with an LLM? /s
honestly i think that'll be a thing in the future "bespoke, hand generated content straight to your best readers"
Nah, models can be fine tuned and trained on anything. Common consumer products like ChatGPT and Gemini have particular styles, very polite and helpful, but there are models trained to be combatative, models trained to write in the style of shakespeare, all sorts of things. Someone could train a model to reply to posts in the style of HN comments and you’d probably never know.
Re: AWS CEO says replacing junior devs with AI is 'one of the dumbest ideas'
#95Earlier quoted context omitted.
Obviously after 10-15 years of experience working as a developer AI will be a senior dev. Probably will get promoted to management with all that experience.
Promoting your best engineers to management sometimes gets you a great manager, but often gets you a mediocre or just-about-competent manager at the cost of a great engineer. I'm a big fan of the "staff engineer" track as a way to avoid this problem. Your 10-15 year engineers who don't vibe with management should be able to continue earning managerial salaries and having the biggest impact possible. https://staffeng.…
This is a general problem that corporations have trouble with with: The struggle to separate leadership and people management. Why does the person who tells you what to do also need to be the same person who does your annual review, who also has to be the same person who leads the technical design of the project, approves your vacation, assists with your career development, and gives feedback or disciplinary correction when you mess up? Why do we always seem to bundle all these distinct roles together under "Manager"?
Re: AWS CEO says replacing junior devs with AI is 'one of the dumbest ideas'
#96My experience is that juniors have an easier time to ramp up, but never get better at proper engineering (analysis) and development processes (debug). They also struggle to read and review code.
I fear that unless you heavily invest in them and follow them, they might be condemned to have decades of junior experience.
Re: AWS CEO says replacing junior devs with AI is 'one of the dumbest ideas'
#97Relevant 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.
Interesting how similar this is to the tradeoff of using AI coding agents
Re: AWS CEO says replacing junior devs with AI is 'one of the dumbest ideas'
#98Relevant 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…
Search is easily the best feature of AI/LLMs.
I kind of agree here. The mental model that works for me is "search results passed through a rock tumbler". Search results without attribution and mixed-and-matched across reputable and non-reputable sources, with a bias toward whatever source type is more common.
Re: AWS CEO says replacing junior devs with AI is 'one of the dumbest ideas'
#99FINALLY.
Re: AWS CEO says replacing junior devs with AI is 'one of the dumbest ideas'
#100Earlier quoted context omitted.
These people are working on destroying the planet to make more money, they absolutely do not care. Our society isn't set up to punish them, but encourage such behavior to even more extremes (see datacenter build outs causing water shortages, electricity hikes, and cancer in poor communities; nearly every politician capitulating on such actions because they don't know better).
I wish people would get off the "AI is the worst thing for the environment" bandwagon. AI and data centers as a whole aren't even in the top 100 emitters of pollution and never will be. If you want to complain about tech companies ruining the environment, look towards policies that force people to come into the office. Pointless commutes are far, far worse for the environment than all data centers combined. Complaini…
> Why don't people get this upset at airport expansions?
We do too, don't worry.