5 ms·

It must be refactored: IBM is hopping that juniors(less paid) with AI can be sold as seniors.

by vb-8448 8mo ago

MattDamonSpace 8mo ago
Still a wildly different thesis than the “juniors are fucked, ladder’s been raised”
- vb-8448 8mo ago
  just to be clear: from my standpoint it's the worst period ever being a junior in tech, you are not "fucked" if you are junior, but hard times are ahead of you.
  - fragmede 8mo ago
    OTOH, as a junior, you haven't learned all the wrong lessons that don't apply anymore, and you have fewer responsibilities than the seniors.
    - rTX5CMRXIfFG 8mo ago
      That still doesn’t sound employable
    - ohyoutravel 8mo ago
      Like what
      - xp84 8mo ago
        Some things take very little time and effort to manifest into the world today that used to take a great deal. So one of the big changes is around whether some things are worth doing at all. Note: I'm not taking any particular side of the "Juniors are F**d" vs "no they're not" argument.
    - culi 8mo ago
      This case has always been made for juniors but it's almost always the opposite that's true. There's always some fad that the industry is over-indexing on. Senior developers tend to be less susceptible to falling for it but non-technical staff and junior developers are not Whether its a hotlang, LLMs, or some new framework. Juniors like to dive right in because the promise of getting a competitive edge against people much more experienced than you is too tantalizing. You really want it to be true
deadbabe 8mo ago
IMO I have found that juniors working with AI is basically just like subscribing to an expensive AI agent.
- sigmoid10 8mo ago
  IMO with the latest generation (gpt codex 5.3 and claude 4.6) most devs could probably be replaced by AI. They can do stuff that I've seen senior devs fail at. When I have a question about a co-workers project, I no longer ask them and instead immediately let copilot have a look at the repo and it will be faster and more accurate at identifying the root cause of issues than humans who actually worked on the project. I've yet to find a scenario where they fail. I'm sure there are still edge cases, but I'm starting to doubt humans will matter in them for long. At this point we really just need better harnesses for these models, but in terms of capabilities they may as well take over now.
  - bluGill 8mo ago
    they are good at some weird problems - but also write some really bad code and sometimes come up with wrong answers.
    - joquarky 8mo ago
      That's why you write tests.
      - bluGill 8mo ago
        There are whole classes of problems that tests can't catch.
  - Aurornis 8mo ago
    > most devs could probably be replaced by AI. They can do stuff that I've seen senior devs fail at. When I read these takes I wonder what kind of companies some of you have been working for. I say this as someone who has been using Opus 4.6 and GPT-Codex-5.3 daily. I think the “senior developer” title inflation created a bubble of developers who coasted on playing the ticket productive game where even small tasks could be turned into points and sprints and charts and graphs such that busy work looked like a lot of work was being done.
giantg2 8mo ago
[flagged]
- vb-8448 8mo ago
  ehm ... it's basically what all big consultancies have been doing in the last 20 years .. and they made tons of money with this model.
  - giantg2 8mo ago
    Making money consulting doesn't require positive results.
K0balt 8mo ago
Tbh, getting good results from ai requires senior level intuition. You can be rusty as hell and not even middling in the language being used, but you have to understand data structures and architecture more than ever to get non-shit results. If you just vibe it, you’ll eventually end up with a mountain of crap that works sort of, and since you’re not doing the coding, you can’t really figure it out as you go along. Sometimes it can work to naively make a thing and then have it rewritten from scratch properly though, so that might be the path.
- Ancalagon 8mo ago
  This mirrors my experience exactly. Vibe coding straight up does not work for any serious code.
  - fragmede 8mo ago
    Todo web apps aren't serious code, I can buy that, but in your mind, what is? Are compilers "serious code"? https://www.anthropic.com/engineering/building-c-compiler https://www.anthropic.com/engineering/building-c-compiler Like, I'm sure it's just laundering gcc's source at some level, but if Claude can handle making a compiler, either we have to reframe a compiler as "not serious", or, well, come up with a different definition for what entails "serious" code.
    - rTX5CMRXIfFG 8mo ago
      Ticketing, payroll, point of sale, banking, HFT, e-commerce, warehouse, shipping… how have you not thought of these
      - fragmede 8mo ago
        The ones I've thought of, and the one's you've thought of, and the ones Ancalagon has in their mind are three partially disjoint sets, but there's probably some intersection, which we can then use as a point of discussion. Given that "serious code" isn't a rigorously defined industry term, maybe you could be less rude?

It must be refactored: IBM is hopping that juniors(less paid) with AI can be sold as seniors.

by vb-8448 8mo ago

It must be refactored: IBM is hopping that juniors(less paid) with AI can be sold as seniors.

MattDamonSpace 8mo ago

Still a wildly different thesis than the “juniors are fucked, ladder’s been raised”

vb-8448 8mo ago
just to be clear: from my standpoint it's the worst period ever being a junior in tech, you are not "fucked" if you are junior, but hard times are ahead of you.
- fragmede 8mo ago
  OTOH, as a junior, you haven't learned all the wrong lessons that don't apply anymore, and you have fewer responsibilities than the seniors.
  - rTX5CMRXIfFG 8mo ago
    That still doesn’t sound employable
  - ohyoutravel 8mo ago
    Like what
    - xp84 8mo ago
      Some things take very little time and effort to manifest into the world today that used to take a great deal. So one of the big changes is around whether some things are worth doing at all. Note: I'm not taking any particular side of the "Juniors are F**d" vs "no they're not" argument.
  - culi 8mo ago
    This case has always been made for juniors but it's almost always the opposite that's true. There's always some fad that the industry is over-indexing on. Senior developers tend to be less susceptible to falling for it but non-technical staff and junior developers are not Whether its a hotlang, LLMs, or some new framework. Juniors like to dive right in because the promise of getting a competitive edge against people much more experienced than you is too tantalizing. You really want it to be true

deadbabe 8mo ago

IMO I have found that juniors working with AI is basically just like subscribing to an expensive AI agent.

sigmoid10 8mo ago
IMO with the latest generation (gpt codex 5.3 and claude 4.6) most devs could probably be replaced by AI. They can do stuff that I've seen senior devs fail at. When I have a question about a co-workers project, I no longer ask them and instead immediately let copilot have a look at the repo and it will be faster and more accurate at identifying the root cause of issues than humans who actually worked on the project. I've yet to find a scenario where they fail. I'm sure there are still edge cases, but I'm starting to doubt humans will matter in them for long. At this point we really just need better harnesses for these models, but in terms of capabilities they may as well take over now.
- bluGill 8mo ago
  they are good at some weird problems - but also write some really bad code and sometimes come up with wrong answers.
  - joquarky 8mo ago
    That's why you write tests.
    - bluGill 8mo ago
      There are whole classes of problems that tests can't catch.
- Aurornis 8mo ago
  > most devs could probably be replaced by AI. They can do stuff that I've seen senior devs fail at. When I read these takes I wonder what kind of companies some of you have been working for. I say this as someone who has been using Opus 4.6 and GPT-Codex-5.3 daily. I think the “senior developer” title inflation created a bubble of developers who coasted on playing the ticket productive game where even small tasks could be turned into points and sprints and charts and graphs such that busy work looked like a lot of work was being done.

giantg2 8mo ago

[flagged]

vb-8448 8mo ago
ehm ... it's basically what all big consultancies have been doing in the last 20 years .. and they made tons of money with this model.
- giantg2 8mo ago
  Making money consulting doesn't require positive results.

K0balt 8mo ago

Tbh, getting good results from ai requires senior level intuition. You can be rusty as hell and not even middling in the language being used, but you have to understand data structures and architecture more than ever to get non-shit results. If you just vibe it, you’ll eventually end up with a mountain of crap that works sort of, and since you’re not doing the coding, you can’t really figure it out as you go along. Sometimes it can work to naively make a thing and then have it rewritten from scratch properly though, so that might be the path.

Ancalagon 8mo ago
This mirrors my experience exactly. Vibe coding straight up does not work for any serious code.
- fragmede 8mo ago
  Todo web apps aren't serious code, I can buy that, but in your mind, what is? Are compilers "serious code"? https://www.anthropic.com/engineering/building-c-compiler https://www.anthropic.com/engineering/building-c-compiler Like, I'm sure it's just laundering gcc's source at some level, but if Claude can handle making a compiler, either we have to reframe a compiler as "not serious", or, well, come up with a different definition for what entails "serious" code.
  - rTX5CMRXIfFG 8mo ago
    Ticketing, payroll, point of sale, banking, HFT, e-commerce, warehouse, shipping… how have you not thought of these
    - fragmede 8mo ago
      The ones I've thought of, and the one's you've thought of, and the ones Ancalagon has in their mind are three partially disjoint sets, but there's probably some intersection, which we can then use as a point of discussion. Given that "serious code" isn't a rigorously defined industry term, maybe you could be less rude?