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I think we can already see AI replacing junior developers. GPT-4 alone does good enough at scaffolding out semi-working code that I do think there's far less o

I think we can already see AI replacing junior developers. GPT-4 alone does good enough at scaffolding out semi-working code that I do think there's far less of a need for seniors to hand off tedium to juniors. This might be a partial explanation for why there seems to be significantly fewer junior developer openings today than there were a decade ago. People are going to split hairs over whether LLMs are actually AI, but the end result is all that matters. LLMs will continue to improve, especially on the code front, raising the minimal skill level just to get in to the field of programming as a human. It's already no longer enough to simply be able to build websites or mobile apps, and there will come a point soon where it will be challenging to compete against no-code/low-code platforms that use AI to tie all the pieces together or create customs at ease. People love to cite prior automations, but the automobile only made hostlers obsolete because it required different skills to work on. AI fundamentally exists to replace skill itself. We might not be totally there yet to where it's a massive threat to wealth, but the potential is there in a way that was simply never the case with grain mills, the cotton gin, the printing press, conveyor belts, automobiles, and so forth.

viscanti 3y ago
> I think we can already see AI replacing junior developers. Even if this is the only effect we see, it still has pretty major consequences for the future. How would one become a senior developer in the future if there are almost no opportunities for junior developers?
- TrackerFF 3y ago
  They don't. They will go the way of the typists.
- bonton89 3y ago
  It will be like COBOL programmers now. We'll pay a lot of money for the graying experts in emergencies and declare non-AI advanced development obsolete. Eventually there will be no senior developers either.
  - ravenstine 3y ago
    What compounds this issue is that most of the graybeards don't actually get paid that much money to come out of retirement to fix code for mainframes, and the incentive simply isn't there for new programmers to learn COBOL and mainframes. It's not even enough to learn COBOL and mainframes because the graybeards are getting paid not just for those skills but familiarity with the quirks of particular systems. Financial institutions want COBOL programmers with experience working on financial systems. There's no way anyone born in my generation can even get started in that realm; not without training or mentorship, which firms seem completely uninterested in providing. The question is what happens when all the graybeards are dead. Are the institutions that are refusing to replace their systems banking on future AI being able to solve all their problems single-handedly? Or are they going to offer a pittance to any one who chooses to learn COBOL? Maybe it will be something in the middle; they will only hire senior engineers with specialties in developing AI/ML models for legacy systems. That is until those seniors become obsolete by their own creations.
    - medvezhenok 3y ago
      No, the solution that will be implemented is likely to be write-from-scratch. Ultimately, you can start a new bank with new technology, move clients money to new technology, have the old bank go belly-up and bankrupt. Sometimes that happens in a new company, sometimes it happens in the same company (i.e. re-writes). Maybe not so extreme, but I think that's likely what will happen over time. Maintaining old software is a choice, and is sometime more expensive than it's worth (depending on what that software does). It can certainly be very painful in certain cases (the Great Depression was a similar "reset" for the financial system as a whole - though without code involved), but the market mechanism will accomplish the objective, though likely not without collateral damage.
    - f0ld 3y ago
      Easy. Their heirs will inherit their jobs.
thimp 3y ago
I think this problem is a symptom of another problem though. I mean the fact we have to scaffold stuff out like that suggests our programming languages are shitty, wasteful and lack sufficient abstraction over common problems. If we're paving that with junior developers or AI then we need to push the problem up the stack a bit more. Example the other day. It took me 30 minutes to work out how to read a damn CSV in Go. Yeah I can ask ChatGPT to do it to me, but why the hell is it so damn unintuitive getting to there. Today I want to plot geographic data in R. This is also a hill to climb. The instructions are simple. Our abstractions are just crappy and ChatGPT is just a shit crutch over a crock.
- notTooFarGone 3y ago
  csv.NewReader(f).ReadAll() takes 2 seconds in your favorite browser. you can add arguments for other seperators and iterate over it like everything else. I think go is a very bad example of "wasteful and lack sufficient abstraction over common problems". It's first and foremost easy and therefore a bit verbose. If you mean "wasteful" by LOC then I'm sorry about that but that's not its purpose.
  - thimp 3y ago
    That's only part of the problem that needs to be solved. I have to read the CSV off the network and parse each field out. In a better language for the task, which I can't choose. > t <- read_csv('https://media.githubusercontent.com/media/datablist/sample-csv-files/main/files/people/people-100.csv') ... > glimpse(t) Rows: 100 Columns: 9 $ Index <dbl> 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16,… $ `User Id` <chr> "88F7B33d2bcf9f5", "f90cD3E76f1A9b9", "DbeAb8CcdfeFC2c… $ `First Name` <chr> "Shelby", "Phillip", "Kristine", "Yesenia", "Lori", "E… $ `Last Name` <chr> "Terrell", "Summers", "Travis", "Martinez", "Todd", "D… $ Sex <chr> "Male", "Female", "Male", "Male", "Male", "Male", "Fem… $ Email <chr> "elijah57@example.net", "bethany14@example.com", "btho… $ Phone <chr> "001-084-906-7849x73518", "214.112.6044x4913", "277.60… $ `Date of birth` <date> 1945-10-26, 1910-03-24, 1992-07-02, 2017-08-03, 1938-… $ `Job Title` <chr> "Games developer", "Phytotherapist", "Homeopath", "Mar… So I'm forced to use a crutch, which is writing a lot of boilerplate.
james_marks 3y ago
If AI is replacing your junior developers, you’re missing the point. Junior developers are an investment that will grow into senior developers.
lp4vn 3y ago
>I do think there's far less of a need for seniors to hand off tedium to juniors. I think that that's something that has been happening now for a long time, at least for the last 20 years. In the beginning of 2000 if you wanted to have a streaming for your website, you'd have to pay your nose to an apache specialist tune your server so that it would be able to survive the load of streaming to a few hudrend of people. Today you just put your stuff on youtube and it's over. More than twenty years ago I once met a "HTML developer". As I read here on hnews: nobody is interested in that kind of productivity anymore. People still have problems with HTML and CSS, but nobody is hiring someone only for that. Today you have to know both HTML and CSS among a ton of other things. It's not this need for heightened productivity that scares me though, what really scares me is that a much, much more productive developer of today probably earns the same thing or even less than a much less productive developer from the past. The productivity gains were all collected by corporations and the capital, the workers got only stagnating wages and increasingly high pressure and scope of work. So it's not only me who has this bad feeling. Workers and common people know that all the gains from AI are not going to stay with the working class. In the past, automation in the public discourse was associated with a richer society where people would have to work less and would have more time to leisure, now even the rocks know that this won't be the case. Companies will use AI to decrease salaries and increase even more their already immense leverage over the rest of the population.

viscanti 3y ago

> I think we can already see AI replacing junior developers. Even if this is the only effect we see, it still has pretty major consequences for the future. How would one become a senior developer in the future if there are almost no opportunities for junior developers?

TrackerFF 3y ago
They don't. They will go the way of the typists.
bonton89 3y ago
It will be like COBOL programmers now. We'll pay a lot of money for the graying experts in emergencies and declare non-AI advanced development obsolete. Eventually there will be no senior developers either.
- ravenstine 3y ago
  What compounds this issue is that most of the graybeards don't actually get paid that much money to come out of retirement to fix code for mainframes, and the incentive simply isn't there for new programmers to learn COBOL and mainframes. It's not even enough to learn COBOL and mainframes because the graybeards are getting paid not just for those skills but familiarity with the quirks of particular systems. Financial institutions want COBOL programmers with experience working on financial systems. There's no way anyone born in my generation can even get started in that realm; not without training or mentorship, which firms seem completely uninterested in providing. The question is what happens when all the graybeards are dead. Are the institutions that are refusing to replace their systems banking on future AI being able to solve all their problems single-handedly? Or are they going to offer a pittance to any one who chooses to learn COBOL? Maybe it will be something in the middle; they will only hire senior engineers with specialties in developing AI/ML models for legacy systems. That is until those seniors become obsolete by their own creations.
  - medvezhenok 3y ago
    No, the solution that will be implemented is likely to be write-from-scratch. Ultimately, you can start a new bank with new technology, move clients money to new technology, have the old bank go belly-up and bankrupt. Sometimes that happens in a new company, sometimes it happens in the same company (i.e. re-writes). Maybe not so extreme, but I think that's likely what will happen over time. Maintaining old software is a choice, and is sometime more expensive than it's worth (depending on what that software does). It can certainly be very painful in certain cases (the Great Depression was a similar "reset" for the financial system as a whole - though without code involved), but the market mechanism will accomplish the objective, though likely not without collateral damage.
  - f0ld 3y ago
    Easy. Their heirs will inherit their jobs.

thimp 3y ago

I think this problem is a symptom of another problem though. I mean the fact we have to scaffold stuff out like that suggests our programming languages are shitty, wasteful and lack sufficient abstraction over common problems. If we're paving that with junior developers or AI then we need to push the problem up the stack a bit more. Example the other day. It took me 30 minutes to work out how to read a damn CSV in Go. Yeah I can ask ChatGPT to do it to me, but why the hell is it so damn unintuitive getting to there. Today I want to plot geographic data in R. This is also a hill to climb. The instructions are simple. Our abstractions are just crappy and ChatGPT is just a shit crutch over a crock.

notTooFarGone 3y ago
csv.NewReader(f).ReadAll() takes 2 seconds in your favorite browser. you can add arguments for other seperators and iterate over it like everything else. I think go is a very bad example of "wasteful and lack sufficient abstraction over common problems". It's first and foremost easy and therefore a bit verbose. If you mean "wasteful" by LOC then I'm sorry about that but that's not its purpose.
- thimp 3y ago
  That's only part of the problem that needs to be solved. I have to read the CSV off the network and parse each field out. In a better language for the task, which I can't choose. > t <- read_csv('https://media.githubusercontent.com/media/datablist/sample-csv-files/main/files/people/people-100.csv') ... > glimpse(t) Rows: 100 Columns: 9 $ Index <dbl> 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16,… $ `User Id` <chr> "88F7B33d2bcf9f5", "f90cD3E76f1A9b9", "DbeAb8CcdfeFC2c… $ `First Name` <chr> "Shelby", "Phillip", "Kristine", "Yesenia", "Lori", "E… $ `Last Name` <chr> "Terrell", "Summers", "Travis", "Martinez", "Todd", "D… $ Sex <chr> "Male", "Female", "Male", "Male", "Male", "Male", "Fem… $ Email <chr> "elijah57@example.net", "bethany14@example.com", "btho… $ Phone <chr> "001-084-906-7849x73518", "214.112.6044x4913", "277.60… $ `Date of birth` <date> 1945-10-26, 1910-03-24, 1992-07-02, 2017-08-03, 1938-… $ `Job Title` <chr> "Games developer", "Phytotherapist", "Homeopath", "Mar… So I'm forced to use a crutch, which is writing a lot of boilerplate.

james_marks 3y ago

If AI is replacing your junior developers, you’re missing the point. Junior developers are an investment that will grow into senior developers.

lp4vn 3y ago

>I do think there's far less of a need for seniors to hand off tedium to juniors. I think that that's something that has been happening now for a long time, at least for the last 20 years. In the beginning of 2000 if you wanted to have a streaming for your website, you'd have to pay your nose to an apache specialist tune your server so that it would be able to survive the load of streaming to a few hudrend of people. Today you just put your stuff on youtube and it's over. More than twenty years ago I once met a "HTML developer". As I read here on hnews: nobody is interested in that kind of productivity anymore. People still have problems with HTML and CSS, but nobody is hiring someone only for that. Today you have to know both HTML and CSS among a ton of other things. It's not this need for heightened productivity that scares me though, what really scares me is that a much, much more productive developer of today probably earns the same thing or even less than a much less productive developer from the past. The productivity gains were all collected by corporations and the capital, the workers got only stagnating wages and increasingly high pressure and scope of work. So it's not only me who has this bad feeling. Workers and common people know that all the gains from AI are not going to stay with the working class. In the past, automation in the public discourse was associated with a richer society where people would have to work less and would have more time to leisure, now even the rocks know that this won't be the case. Companies will use AI to decrease salaries and increase even more their already immense leverage over the rest of the population.