AI is making junior devs useless

slibhb

I think this concern is overblown. AI is an incredible teaching tool. It's probably better for teaching/explaining than for writing code. This will make the next generation of junior devs far more effective than previous generations. Not because they're skipping the fundamentals...because they have a better grasp of the fundamentals due to back-and-forth with infinitely patient AI teachers.

dangus

This is going to be music to deaf ears. Companies will continue to demand it (I know people working at companies that are literally looking at AI usage as an individual performance metric, puke emoji ), and probably 95% of humans using pretty understandable human logic aren’t going to work harder than they need to on purpose. I wish I had a solution. I think the jury is still out on whether programming will be a dead profession in a short number of years, replaced by technical protect operators.

esafak

Junior devs: you have an oracle you can pester incessantly. Make the most of it so you can learn to detect its mistakes, know when to push back, and what to ask of it. That's when you are in the clear. Juniors who merely parrot the LLM get fired.

verdverm

This is good advice for seniors too. Eg. When using Ai Deep Research for hard to debug issues, asking for the why makes for a much better response.

moritonal

When I started my career I heard people say almost verbatim "Stack overflow is making junior devs useless", with the idea all we did was copypaste scripts over. The same people failed, and the same people who can use the tools will succeed now.

recursivedoubts

As I tell my students: juniors, you must write the code https://htmx.org/essays/yes-and/ Everyone else: we must let the juniors write the code. Seniors come from juniors. If you want seniors, you must let the juniors write the code.

garyfirestorm

Yes and no. Often times managers are now asking ask Claude code to write it but I want it delivered tomorrow. This leads to us forcing to use LLM generated code without enough time to review or understand it.

adamtaylor_13

I can't seem to get the article to load, but I think I get the gist from the title. I hired a junior "dev" who literally hadn't even completed an HTML course. Before AI I could not have hired them because they literally did not know how to dev. After AI, anyone with a little grit can push themselves into the field pretty easily. As with everything in life: you can choose to hard route or you can choose the easy route and your results will follow accordingly.

re-thc

I assume junior devs can at least search. AI often doesn't even do that. That's why there are things like context7, which in a narrow context helps but not perfect. There are lots of ambiguous situations where a search and human "inference" can solve that AI still can't. I can tell the AI to do something, it uses the worst approach, I tell it a better way exists, it says it validated it does not, I link to a GitHub issue saying it can be done via workarounds and it still fails. It's worse for longer tasks where it always shortcuts to if it fails pick a "safe" approach (including not doing it). Funny enough we need the junior to guide the AI.

kburman

The "Junior Trap" is real: if you offload your thinking to Claude or GPT-4, you’re hitting "Done" for the day, but you’re accruing massive Learning Debt. You aren't building the failure-pattern recognition that actually makes an engineer valuable. In a world where "Code is no longer a skill," the only way to survive is to stop being a "Prompt Operator" and start being a "System Auditor." If you can’t explain the trade-offs of the architectural pattern the AI just gave you, you aren't an engineer, you're just the person holding the screwdriver while the machine builds the house.

pluc

I can't wait until the AI people realize that without developers' original ideas, AI has nothing new to steal from. We don't create, AI will spit out the same old concepts. What, you're gonna create the next generation of AI by training it on what the very same AI has already produced? C'mon now. You don't get technical creativity reflexes by using AI. This is technical stagnation in the making. By cannibalizing its own sources, AI is ensuring that future generations are locked-in subscription models to do the most basic technical tasks. This is all obvious, yet we speed up every chance we get.

tinyhouse

AI made juniors without potential useless, not all juniors.

13415

Useless? Where do they expect the senior engineers to come from in the future?

paulsutter

This is ridiculous. New developers will learn a completely different skill path from what we learned, and they will get where we are faster than we did.

nextstepfan

Actually the truth is that a lot of senior devs are not very good either, and have negative value. But they have an inflated value of themselves that does not reflect reality. Pretty much all software projects seem to peak, and then decline in quality. There are only a handful of senior devs in the world who are actually good programmers.

palad1n

tl;dr ask why

BobbyJo

Junior devs have always been useless. You used to give them tasks that take them a week or two even though a senior engineer could do it in a couple hours, not because you wanted them to contribute, but because you wanted them to learn to contribute. The same ethos makes sense with AI, it's just that every company is trying to avoid paying that training tax. Why turn a junior into a senior yourself if you can get the competition to pay for it instead.

weatherlite

My nightmare scenario (which might start to materilize) is that our last years in the industry will be becoming prompt monkies / agent "managers" working on codebases we barely understand in such velocity there's no way we can gain real understanding. Whenever something breaks (and it will , a lot) A.I will fix it - or so we'll hope. And the sad thing is - this might work; you'll get more stuff done with fewer people. Sure, we didn't sign up for this, it's not a fun job what I've described, but why should management care? They have their own problems and A.I is threatening their jobs as well.

jmyeet

It's interesting to watch industry after industry hollow itself out from the inside then inevitably die long after all the financial people, investment bankers and management consultants have all cashed their checks. Steve Jobs famously accurately called this out years ago [1]. Xerox, Boeing, PC manufacturers (who basically created the Taiwanese makers through a series of short-term outsourcing steps), etc. But there are two examples I want to talk about specifically. First, one lasting impact of the 2008 GFC was that entry-level jobs disappeared. This devastated a generation of millenial college graduates who suddenly had a mountain of student loan debt (thanks to education costs outpacing inflation by a lot) but suddenly no jobs. It became a bit of a joke to poke fun at such people who had a ton of debt and worked as baristas but this was a shallow "analysis". It was really a systemic collapse. Those entry-level workers are your future senior workers and leaders. Those jobs have never come back. The rise of DVR/TiVo and ultimately streaming brought on a golden age of TV in the 2000s. It was kind of the last hurrah for network shows that produced 22 episodes a year before streamers instead produced 8 episodes every 4 years. But what made this system work was an ecosystem. Living in LA, Atlanta and a few other places was relatively cheap so aspiring actors and writers and entertainmnet professionals could get by with secon djobs and relatively low income. These became the future headline actors and senior professionals. Background work and odd jobs were sufficient. Background work also taught people how to be on a set. Studios still had large writing staffs. Some writers would be on set. Those writers were your future producers and showrunners. Part of what supported all of this was syndication. That is, networks produced shows and basic cable channels would pay to rerun them. Syndicating some shows was incredibly profitable in some cases (eg Seinfeld). So the streamers came along and stripped things down. They got rid of junior positions. They adopted so-called "mini writing rooms". Those writers didn't tend to ever be on set. The runs were shorter and an 8 episode series couldn't support a writer in the same way a 22 episode series could. The streamers then were largely showing just their own content so residuals and syndication fees just went away. All of this is short-term thinking. Hollywood has been both a massive industry and a source of American soft power internationally by spreading culture, basically. I think the software engineering space is going through a similar transformation to what happened to the entertainment industry. A handful of people will do very well. AIs will destroy entry-level jobs and basically destroy that company and industry's future. I predict in 10-20 years we'll see China totally dominating this space and a bunch of Linkedin "thought leaders" and politicians will be standing around scratchin their heads asking "what happened?" [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K1WrHH-WtaA

raw_anon_1111

I did my first completely vibe coded not looking at a line of code implementation last year and my second this year. I could care less about why either Claude, Codex or before that a developer was using a for loop or a while loop. I did and do care about architecture. I’m no more going to review every line of code with AI than I am when I was delegating to more junior developers. I’m going to ask Claude Code about how it implemented something where I know there is an efficient way vs naive way, find and test corner cases via manual and automated tests and do the same for functional and non functional requirements.