21 ms·

AI is making junior devs useless

218 points by beabetterdev 7mo ago

slibhb 7mo ago
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 7mo ago
  I do agree it’s a great tool, so much better than trying to hope and pray someone on the internet can help you with “I don’t understand this line of code.” However, it’s got a lot of downsides too.
- DJBunnies 7mo ago
  Not in my experience. They just regurgitate code, and juniors don’t know if/why it’s good or bad and consequently can’t field questions on their PR. “It’s what the LLM said.” - Great. Now go learn it and do it again yourself.
  - danielbln 7mo ago
    I always say "own the output". No need to do it by hand but you better damn well research _why_ the AI chose a solution, and what alternatives there are and why not something else, how it works and so on. Ask the AI, ask a seperate agent/model, Google for it, I don't care, but "I don't know the LLM told me" is not acceptable.
  - tpmoney 7mo ago
    Unless your company is investing in actually teaching your junior devs, this isn't really all that different than the days when jr devs just copied and pasted something out of stack overflow, or blindly copied entire class files around just to change 1 line in what could otherwise have been a shared method. And if your company is actually investing time and resources into teaching your junior devs, then whether they're copying and pasting from stack overflow, from another file in the project or from AI doesn't really matter. In my experience it is the very rare junior dev that can learn what's good or bad about a given design on their own. Either they needed to be paired with a sr dev to look at things and explain why they might not want to something a given way, or they needed to wind up having to fix the mess they made when their code breaks something. AI doesn't change that.
  - HDThoreaun 7mo ago
    This just means you have bad juniors who aren’t interested in learning.
    - alternatex 7mo ago
      It's easier to be lazy now more than ever. Hard to blame them because the temptation to deliver and prove oneself as a junior is always high. I can't count how many seniors have forgotten what it means to understand the code they're merging since AI coding tools became popular. So long as businesses only value quantity the odds are stacked against juniors.
  - slibhb 7mo ago
    For me, the hardest part of software development was learning incantations. These are not interesting, they're conventions that you have to learn to get stuff to work. AI makes this process easier. If people use AI to generate code they don't understand, that will bite them. But it's an incredibly tool for explaining code and teaching you boring, rote incantations.
- techpression 7mo ago
  Only for people who wants be taught, this argument keeps coming up again and again but people in general doesn’t want to learn how to fish, they want the fish on a plate ready to eat, so that they can continue scrolling. I see this a lot in juniors, they are solution seekers, not problem solvers, and AI makes this difference a lot worse.
- croes 7mo ago
  A teacher who just gives you the solution isn’t a good teacher. You can use AI as a teacher but how many will do that?
  - jatari 7mo ago
    Highly motivated people will use whatever tools they have to get better at something, whether they have a textbook, the internet or a LLM to use. The skill of the very top programmers will continue to increase with the advent of new tools.
    - croes 7mo ago
      And how many will not? For mist people it’s just a job to get money, they will put exactly as much effort in it as is necessary to produce an acceptable result
- veryemartguy 7mo ago
  [flagged]
- TacticalCoder 7mo ago
  > AI is an incredible teaching tool. It's probably better for teaching/explaining than for writing code. It is but how do you teach to people who think their new profession is being a "senior prompt engineer" (with 4 months of experience) and who believe that in 12 months there won't be any programmer left?
- Thanemate 7mo ago
  >AI is an incredible teaching tool. As a junior, my top issue is finding valuable learning material that isn't full of poor or outright wrong information. In the best and most generous interpretation of your statement, LLM's simply removed my need to search for the information. That doesn't mean it's not of poor quality or outright wrong.
  - ndriscoll 7mo ago
    I suspect that the quality is ironically correlated with the expertise of the user (i.e. it is knowledgeable if you are knowledgeable), which puts you in a conundrum (I can report that with a couple decades of experience, LLMs are giving me high quality, correct results, but I can already see that it somehow doesn't work as well for some of my less experienced colleagues. A lot of what I've been doing over the last couple months is trying to find how to make it "just work" for them.). As a general principle, take advantage of the fact that it can easily generate stuff. If you don't know whether something is true, have it prove it. Make a PoC/test/benchmark to demonstrate what it's saying. Have it pull metrics that you have access to. Add more observability. Create feedback loops (or rather, ask it to create feedback loops). They're very good at reasoning given access to the ground truth, so give them more ability to ground themselves. They also have fantastic knowledge of public things, but no knowledge of your company, so your instructions should mostly be documentation of what's unique to your company. If it can write an instruction on its own (e.g. how to use git or kubernetes), it is a useless instruction; it already knows that. What it doesn't know is e.g. where your git server is. It also doesn't know what matters to your company: are you a startup trying to find product market fit? Are you an established company that is not allowed to break customer setups? etc. You might even be able to ask it what kinds of questions a senior might ask about how a company/team works when coming into a new job, and then see if you can answer those questions (or find someone who can). In fact, go ask chatgpt: > What are some questions a senior engineer might ask when coming into a new role to make themselves more effective? > What are some questions a principle engineer might ask when coming into a new role to make themselves more effective? > What are some questions an engineering manager might ask when coming into a new role to make themselves more effective? > What are some questions an engineering director might ask when coming into a new role to make themselves more effective?
- kgeist 7mo ago
  Research [0] from Anthropic about juniors learning to code with AI/without: >the AI group averaged 50% on the quiz, compared to 67% in the hand-coding group And why would they do better? There's less incentive to learn because it's so easy to offload thinking to AI. [0] https://www.anthropic.com/research/AI-assistance-coding-skills https://www.anthropic.com/research/AI-assistance-coding-skil...
- gamblor956 7mo ago
  Objectively speaking, students that use AI score more than a full grade point below their peers not using AI. AI makes students dumber, not smarter.
- fasbiner 7mo ago
  Presumably you do a lot of back-and-forth with AI, and as many other commenters have pointed out, this seems to have made you more credulous and less informed.
dangus 7mo ago
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 7mo ago
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.
- sarchertech 7mo ago
  It’s gonna take a long time for that to become the norm I think. I really wish I could take 5 years off while everyone figures this out.
  - wreath 7mo ago
    You don't have to take 5 years off for it. Just continue same old business (assuming you don't have outside pressure to use this slop-machine) and keep your skills and judgment sharp until the tools and workflow stabilizes, and most of all, the money to fuel this hype runs out.
    - sarchertech 7mo ago
      The reason I say that is because I don’t want to deal with trying to keep things from collapsing around me while people slam in tens of thousands of lines of vibe coded slop.
verdverm 7mo ago
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 7mo ago
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.
- 52-6F-62 7mo ago
  I'm not sure sure. I worked under people who started as juniors that way but were politically savvy. Or just ruthless. And pushed their way to the top by stealing projects, lying through their teeth, and other such tactics. They were slowing down progress because their methods involved sabotaging the progress of others because it might make their own contributions shine a little less. They were the cause of using libraries like leftPad all through business critical code, and cutting anyone down who dared to simply question why. These things cause ripples. The smartest and most capable staff leaves, what results is a churn of the same kind. But hey, they get a trip to Mexico every year and burn through millions every two years. Profit any day now.
- ehnto 7mo ago
  You definitely did see a difference between people who just copy pasted from stack overflow, and from people with good fundamentals. The uncomfortable truth though, is that the industry didn't need good coders, it needed a bucket load of basic web apps and it needed bums in seats. I think the irony of AI is going to be that it will make the remaining software jobs properly hard again, and implementers (ex coders) will be able to succeed with even less code knowledge than before.
recursivedoubts 7mo ago
As I tell my students: juniors, you must write the code https://htmx.org/essays/yes-and/ 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.
- Thanemate 7mo ago
  The issue stems from 2 things: 1) People hearing "an LLM is as smart as a junior" and actually opting for the LLM subscription price instead of hiring a junior 2) The gap between senior and junior in terms of performance has become larger, since the senior devs had their hands get dirty for years typing stuff out manually AND also tackling challenges. This generation of junior-mid developers will have a significant portion of the "typing stuff" chopped off, and we're still pretending that this will end up being fine.
  - jnwatson 7mo ago
    I think your second point is interesting, and it has actually already happened a couple of times. It used to be a lot easier to find devs that knew assembly and could navigate call stacks through memory by hand because a lot of folks had to learn that to get their job done. Now higher level languages have mostly eliminated that level of operation. The same applies to infosec roles. It is 10x harder for junior infosec folks than 20 years ago because there are a bunch of skills you need in infosec that today's mainline dev experience doesn't need, but were more common a while ago. Case in point, I remember working with a partner company's junior engineer on some integration. They needed some hard-coded constant changed and time was of the essence. I told them to change a couple bytes in the elf binary directly. They looked at me like I was a wizard. I thought it was a fairly pedestrian skill having grown up reversing computer game save files.
    - mycall 7mo ago
      Hex editors are a black box to most 99% devs these days. I noticed their use falling off once code-signing came into use.
garyfirestorm 7mo ago
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.
- sarchertech 7mo ago
  I hope you don’t have actual users.
  - nkmnz 7mo ago
    Don't worry, he works for the DoW.
    - garyfirestorm 7mo ago
      lol no i don't.
adamtaylor_13 7mo ago
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.
- risyachka 7mo ago
  >> who literally hadn't even completed an HTML course. so what is their value? proxy your requests to ai?
  - adamtaylor_13 7mo ago
    Their value is it's my brother and I need a human brain to be able to slowly morph into a developer over time. So I suppose, sorta, yes. The expectation is to proxy AI requests while building a mental framework for how software is built.
- troad 7mo ago
  > As with everything in life: you can choose to hard route or you can choose the easy route and your results will follow accordingly. Hard agree, but probably not in the way you're implying. It's the difficult things that make life fun and interesting. A life spent going from one easy thing to another is a life barely lived at all.
  - raw_anon_1111 7mo ago
    From a professional standpoint, I’ve never found “enjoyment” from coding. I enjoy every part of the process of getting business goals from talking to stakeholders -> completed project with coding being the necessary evil. Funny enough, I started working in 1996 professionally (and had been a hobbyist for six years before going to college). But it was only between 2012-2016 that I was a ticket taker without working with the end user directly - everything I’ve done has been B2B. GenAI (and working remotely since 2020) has made me enjoy every part of my job.
re-thc 7mo ago
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 7mo ago
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.
deleted 7mo ago
[deleted]
pluc 7mo ago
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.
- microgpt 7mo ago
  I don't expect them to realise that until some time after it actually happens. When it remains a future hypothetical, it won't be accounted for.
- VoodooJuJu 7mo ago
  [dead]
- PetoU 7mo ago
  fwiw 90% of software is reinventing the wheel. 80% of devs have an itch to "rewrite from scratch". AI will deduplicate all of this
  - pluc 7mo ago
    This is fine. How else do you learn but by taking things apart and rebuilding them? This obsession with productivity is incompatible with onboarding new talent. Having 1000 versions of the same concept is exactly what progress is.
    - skeledrew 7mo ago
      > 1000 versions of the same concept That sounds beyond wasteful.
      - pluc 7mo ago
jmyeet 7mo ago
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 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K1WrHH-WtaA
tinyhouse 7mo ago
AI made juniors without potential useless, not all juniors.
13415 7mo ago
Useless? Where do they expect the senior engineers to come from in the future?
paulsutter 7mo ago
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.
- JackSlateur 7mo ago
  I watched star wars, so I know how to fly a spaceship
nextstepfan 7mo ago
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.
- zsoltkacsandi 7mo ago
  I agree. But it’s not about that they have inflated value but it comes down to how “modern” software producing organizations work. Product managers and C-level people do not know what they are doing either. Most people are part of the “software engineering” theater, recruiters are recruiting, manager are managing, software developers are developing software, all of them just to get paid or gain status in the org. Most of the values come from that handful people who can really deliver.
  - whattheheckheck 7mo ago
    Yeah read Software and Mind by Andrei Sorin
    - slopinthebag 7mo ago
      > The mechanistic myth is the belief that everything can be described as a neat hierarchical structure of things within things. And few of us realize that our entire culture is based on this fallacy. While the world consists of complex, interacting structures, we prefer to treat every phenomenon as a simple, isolated structure. > Through our software pursuits, the mechanistic myth has spread beyond its academic origins, and is now affecting every aspect of human existence. In just one generation, it has expanded from worthless theories of mind and society (behaviour- ism, structuralism, universal grammar, etc.) to worthless concepts in the field of programming (structured programming, object-oriented pro- gramming, the relational database model, etc.) to worthless software-related activities that we all have to perform. > What is worse, our mechanistic beliefs have permitted powerful software elites to arise. While appearing to help us enjoy the benefits of software, the elites are in fact preventing us from creating and using software effectively. By invoking mechanistic software principles, they are fostering ignorance in software-related matters and inducing dependence on their systems. > Increasingly, in one occupation after another, all we need to know is how to operate some software systems that are based on mechanistic principles. But our minds are capable of non- mechanistic knowledge. So, when the elites force us to depend on their software, they exploit us in two ways: by preventing us from creating better, non-mechanistic software; and by preventing us from using the superior, non-mechanistic capabilities of our minds. > The ultimate consequence of our mechanistic culture, then, is the degradation of minds. If we restrict ourselves to mechanistic performance, our non-mechanistic capabilities remain un- developed. The world is becoming more and more complex, yet we see only its simple, mechanistic aspects. So we cope perhaps with the mechanistic problems, but the complex, non-mechanistic ones remain unsolved, and may eventually destroy us. Wow, I'm immediately hooked. The book is free online as well to download.
palad1n 7mo ago
tl;dr ask why
BobbyJo 7mo ago
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.
- xorgun 7mo ago
  [dead]
- sunir 7mo ago
  Agreed. We are still in a capital crunch so overhiring is out of fashion. People don’t remember the early 90s or the dot.bust when the same things were said. Kraft 1977 Programmers and Managers talked about this if I recall. Still the best alternate take on our industry I have ever read.
  - fdgg 7mo ago
    The most likely explanation for "AI layoffs" is not that AI has caused a dramatic jump in productivity - its more that managers are running out of creativity in relation to revenue-generating and cost-reducing projects and henceforth have no use for the surplus of labour. Its much easier to maximize the stock price in the short-term by riding the 'AI' wave. There seems to be some nonsensical belief that there exists this endless stream of positive NPV projects to take. No... reality is not like that.
    - sunir 7mo ago
      That’s a strong point. I interpret that: Covid created needs that weren’t permanent and also caused overinvestment to address digitalization and remote life needs to support lockdown as well as predictions for a permanent change in the future. Either way a lot of the work to be done in software is done for a while.
- 7mo ago
weatherlite 7mo ago
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.
- zozbot234 7mo ago
  > 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. It will always be preferable to work on an understandable codebase, because that maximizes the AI's affordances too. And then the AI can explain things to you. A skilled human will always have a lot of solid knowledge relating to their hyper-specific niche that isn't part of your average general purpose AI, so humans will obviously have a key role to play still.
- oddsockmachine 7mo ago
  I'm already seeing this in the company I recently joined: 80-90% of code is generated/prompted. Big PRs, very little review or oversight. Absolutely nobody considering long-term architecture (and IMO nobody capable of such). In general, there's very little critical thinking involved at any stage, just throw error messages back into the LLM, rinse and repeat. I'm hoping there's a world where people with skills are useful in getting these projects back on track, but perhaps as a society we're learning to accept this reduction in quality.
  - weatherlite 7mo ago
    And how do u sum up the tradeoffs so far, or is it too early to tell ? Do u see lots of unacceptable shit making into production that wouldn't have before A.I for example ?
ivanjermakov 7mo ago
Copying homework and cheating at exams don't make student learn. It takes time to become a junior too. Emerging tech landscape could affect skills and knowledge that is expected from entry level job applicants.
raw_anon_1111 7mo ago
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.
sega_sai 7mo ago
I recently read a similar discussion in the context of AI in science and PhD students. And the point the author was making that the goal of having PhD students is NOT to produce academic research, but to train people. I think the same idea applies here. Somebody still needs to train people, and the companies will probably need to ensure that they have resources for that, as there will not be enough senior people for all the tasks.
- selimthegrim 7mo ago
  I understand that but try getting hired in industry as a PhD with that argument.
- whattheheckheck 7mo ago
  Back to fuedalism we go!
hluska 7mo ago
> If I’m reviewing your code and I ask you why you went with a certain approach, and you tell me “the AI suggested it”, I’ve immediately lost confidence in you. I’ve experienced similar things and so understand the feeling, but this is poor leadership. If someone on your team makes it all the way to a code review and still thinks ‘the AI suggested it’, you failed to train them, failed to set expectations and they have justifiably lost more confidence in you than vice versa. If we analyze the rest of the article through the lens of weak leadership, it sounds less like an AI problem and more like a corporate leadership problem.
thallavajhula 7mo ago
Just another silly uninformed take.
FpUser 7mo ago
Problem is not making juniors useless. They kind of are by definition. Problem is that now they have very little chance to become seniors.
- raegis 7mo ago
  "juniors are useless": Maybe y'all should consider updating this hyberbolic language. Nobody is born a "senior developer", so surely all of your training as a "junior" is not useless. There is always a disconnect between what younger people know and what older people expect them to know, so training is required almost universally.
  - FpUser 7mo ago
    >"juniors are useless. Maybe y'all should consider updating this hyberbolic language" Don't be so dense. It is a figure of speech. We all were useless at some point. Nothing to be ashamed of
mh2266 7mo ago
This post, ironically, seems very likely to have been written by an LLM :/ "it's not x, but y", with bonus em-dash: > your value as a developer is not in your ability to ship code. It’s in your ability to look at code "But here’s the thing." "And honestly?"
- opem 7mo ago
  I think so. Just go to the homepage, all of the thumbnails are AI generated with clickbaity titles.
- adampunk 7mo ago
  There appears to be a cottage industry in pumping out "LLMs will eat your skills; listen to me, the wise senior engineer with the same anxieties" pieces. https://www.ivanturkovic.com/2026/02/25/ai-made-writing-code-easier-engineering-harder/ https://www.ivanturkovic.com/2026/02/25/ai-made-writing-code... That's the same style. Plays well there, tho, it seems. Even when an agent writes it.
- i_think_so 7mo ago
  Somebody said "once you learn to recognize this pattern you'll see it everywhere." I was half hoping I never would; now that I do I'm sure it will be depressing to read most web content generated after 2023. Sigh. This is why humanity can't have nice things -- it's not X (because we break them like careless children), but Y (we make cheap crappy copies that push out the good and the real). But here's the thing. No, actually, there is no other thing. This is our future now. And honestly? I think I'll go talk that that guy I knew in high school and see if he's willing to train a new welder.
pelasaco 7mo ago
"AI is making junior devs useless" is a dangerous and incorrect conclusion. If this idea is repeated too often, people may start to believe it and even quit studying computer science altogether. First of all, developers who only learn to code in a short bootcamp are often not well prepared — but that was already true before AI. In the past, many junior developers were students who were learning programming while studying, not just people who took a quick Python course on Udemy. Instead of declaring junior developers useless, we should raise the standard: learn how to code properly, how to maintain code, understand networks, and build strong foundations in math and computer science. A well-trained junior developer is still extremely valuable and will always be needed.
lenerdenator 7mo ago
You're going to have to do the unthinkable: Invest in the training of your junior employees. The cost of generating code is now laughable, so that's not the economic value brought to the table by a junior engineer, or really, any engineer. The value is now generated by knowing what code is good code. You're going to have to have talks, book clubs, hackathons, and the like to get your juniors to know what good code is. Do they know what design patterns are? How about good architecture? If they can't name a few design patterns, you're not investing enough.
kshahkshah 7mo ago
I see so much creativity coming from young developers I just can’t agree. Yes most developers in the past 20 years who were only chasing big tech money were useless. Good riddance
amelius 7mo ago
It also makes junior devs unobtainable. Because who in their right mind is going to start a career in CS these days?
- holtkam2 7mo ago
  Idk, anyone who wants to understand and apply the most powerful and transformative technology in human history…?
  - amelius 7mo ago
    1. There isn't much to understand about this technology. 2. Unlike in the past, you can't program the technology without having billions in cash.
mdavid626 7mo ago
It feels like to me that junior devs don’t understand what they even need to learn. They just use agentic coding to get things done, without any deeper knowledge. The worst is, they think they know exactly what they need to learn, and also think they can make good decisions.
rishabhaiover 7mo ago
Every week, I read an article on the consequences of reliable coding agents in SWE industry. All such discussions on HN leads to a fundamental suspicion of the empirical scaling laws of LLMs or the infinite greed and short-sightedness of the market in inflating a bubble. I'm tired.
borzi 7mo ago
This is 100% an issue on the side of the senior developers. Imagine saying "these juniors are useless" because you are making them work in assembly, but C has just been released. You are giving them menial work that is no longer required to do by humans. Instead of giving them the task "update these email templates", the norm should be: "create this new service that automates an internal process". They will make mistakes and they will learn - but what they will be doing is going to be very useful and also give them chance to grow the necessary skills for this new era, with the supervision of a senior.
- JeremyNT 7mo ago
  I think the issue is they used to make progress at a snails pace and you had plenty of teachable moments. Now anybody can vibe code something that seems to work with a million landmines. How can they develop the intuition around this given that they don't know what they don't know? How can we review it and help them get there? Maybe we can figure it out, but I'm not sure it's easy or obvious.
  - borzi 7mo ago
    By making them walk into the landmines and forcing them to fix it - that is how everyone became a good programmer. It's just the scope that has changed.
daxfohl 7mo ago
Nah, it makes teams useless. Maybe not quite yet, but soon, one engineer will be able to do a few sprint teams' worth of work, and deliver features orders of magnitude faster than a team working in parallel. Yeah, generally at first this will be seniors only. But before long, a junior will be able to come in and learn to manage one sprint team's worth of work under the guidance of a senior and partnered with a PM, and grow the product from there. Long term, I imagine 90% workforce reduction will be the norm. Just about all software is a rinse and repeat of some other software, not much true innovation, so picking and choosing and implementing some other software's feature into your own will start to become trivial single-day projects from start to finish. Hopefully AI creates some new industries that SWEs can roll into, but I'm feeling more doomer every day.
- borzi 7mo ago
  Yeap, and people are still forcing juniors to make small code changes when they should be learning by creating entire apps on their own, deploying them, etc. WITH a senior giving them feedback occasionally. I think people are going to take a while to catch on though, for better or worse....
  - daxfohl 7mo ago
    Yeah, IMO one of the first things we'll see change is more of a migration back to monoliths. Right now adding a feature has to go through multiple teams, a dozen services, a coordinated implementation and deployment schedule, a Byzantine and often manual set of integration tests, etc. Yeah AI can help with that, but the point is that AI doesn't need it. On a monolith, it sucks for dev teams because parallel development at large scale is difficult and other teams' bugs can delay the launch of your unrelated project. Hence, microservices became popular. With AI, development happens so fast that it's largely serial. So there's no real coordination needed. A whole feature is one PR, one set of tests, one app to run locally if you want, one deployment, one thing to look at and roll back if there's a bug. Creates a virtuous cycle all the way up. I imagine lots of established companies will struggle migrating back to that pattern, but I have to think most new companies will head in that direction, which should let them catch up quickly. Anyway that's my take. We'll see.
guax 7mo ago
Ai might bring forward the standardisation we never had. If coding dynamics shift enough then all the opinions about libraries and engines and frameworks might get less focused on readability and more on efficiency and easy composition by Ai. Security gets outsourced to audited layers and Ai does the stupid boring jobs of gluing them together. Some developers become more specialised and niche, some pivot to product, some pivot to other areas. There are plenty of people who joined software for the payout and hate it. Plenty of people who grown to hate it over time. I've been enjoying using it to figure out toy projects but paying an API and depending on a service to code is very sour. I really hope hardware specialises and local models become good enough. Gate keeping development on centralised services would be a loss for everyone and ripe for dystopian outcomes.
opem 7mo ago
Is this writeup AI generated?
keeda 7mo ago
I maintain that in the future, any person wishing to learn any skill (not just coding!) will need to willingly eschew the use of AI when learning until they have "built the muscles". The literature is clear that repeated, hands-on practice is really the only way to build skills. I suspect the progression will be "No AI until intuition (whatever that is for that skill)" -> "Gradual use of AI to understand where it falls short" -> "AI native expert". How to actually implement this at scale is still TBD ;-) Ironically, AI will be invaluable for this e.g. as a hyper-personalized tutor but it will also present an irresistible temptation to offload the hands-on practice. We already have studies indicating the former is helpful but the latter stifles mastery. At this point I can only see self-discipline as a mechanism to willingly avoid AI. Unfortunately, our testing-oriented education system only serves to incentivize over-reliance on AI (Goodhart's Law etc.) None of our current institutions and processes are suited for what is already happening and will only accelerate from here on. Things will need to change radically. For this reason, I once predicted apprenticeships will be a thing again, and already there are signs with Microsoft's preceptorship proposal: https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3779312 https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3779312 This is highly encouraging because a tech giant is not only acknowledging the problem, but proposing a solution. Not a complete solution by far but at least a start.
- nerdsniper 7mo ago
  I learned Calculus despite having access to Mathematica, TI-89/92/CX-CAS, and WolframAlpha. I still had to do hundreds of derivations and integrations and manual manipulation of separable differential equations entirely by hand to learn it. But these tools made it easier for me to understand what I was doing wrong. So, I agree with you, but it's also already been true for decades now with other tools.
  - array_key_first 7mo ago
    All these tools only replace mechanical aspects, not thinking ones. AI is truly unique and unprecedented in that way. A spellchecker is purely mechanical, it just helps you spell your essay right. But it won't make your essay good, or help you write the right essay.
h4kunamata 7mo ago
The silver line is not to avoid AI but to use it wisely, and this is coming from somebody who used to hate AI. I am not a Python developer or developer for the matter but Perplexity AI did help me to understand the bsic of Python for API requests and get projects delivery with 94% code coverage and vulnerability free. AI also reduced the time spent with Ansible playbook generation, but I do know Ansible, I do know Linux, homelab is my hobby so I am not just doing copy and paste. I review whatever it generates and correct it when required. In the companies I have worked and work, I see developers themselves confessing "I used AI, it works but idk how"! AI itself does not make you useless, only and only if you used it as a smart search engine. If you are doing copy/paste, you are going to get so screwed professionally speaking. Folks are no longer learning and what they are doing, AI can do on its own. That is making some developer useless.
cryptonector 7mo ago
> > For someone like you, who likely has years of experience without LLMs, your brain totally understands good code/bad code, good architecture, and just general intuition around code and systems. LLMs must be an absolute gamechanger. But for someone like me who is starting out in this field, how am I supposed to build the years of experience and intuition that comes from manually writing code and building systems when companies are expecting AI to be used from here on out? Answer: juniors need to work with seniors, and the seniors need to teach the juniors, and the juniors need to learn to use LLMs to learn, not just to do the work.
- fragmede 7mo ago
  I've been teaching a few people to vibecode, and it depends on the person learning. The honest answer is as someone who's been in the industry multiple decades, a lot of my knowledge isn't necessary to be useful at vibecoding. I was about to go into a long discussion about cryptography and public private keys, and prime numbers and RSA and gpg and etc but we short circuited that discussion by asking ChatGPT about it and asking it to dumb down the explanation it gave to a couple of salient sentences and I added some flavor and we moved on with our lives.
ramon156 7mo ago
Next year I'm going to experience my first junior, which is crazy considering I have 3 YOE. Nonetheless I'm very curious what kind of graduates come out of the current education
rhubarbtree 7mo ago
I don’t know if this is related, but the standards of CS university courses in the UK are objectively way below what they were 25 years ago. You can compare two syllabuses from the same course and the difference is shocking. It may be AI has raised the bar, but also that junior devs out of uni are just much worse than they used to be.
- fdgg 7mo ago
  Youre not wrong. Theres been a lot stuff going in the UK that goes back to high-school level stuff. Grade inflation etc. Its a disaster.
prpl 7mo ago
I think this is true, but I think it’s quite possible an inversion could come
sotix 7mo ago
AI has made senior engineers useless to me. I have purposefully asked senior engineers specific questions to get their insight on a matter only to have them tell me, "here's what our internal AI tool said". This has occurred countless times. I find that staff and principal engineers have remained extraordinarily valuable as teachers. Our junior devs have been exceptional and are eager to learn. Our seniors have become lazier and stopped being as generous with their knowledge.
- fdgg 7mo ago
  Its a disaster. Remember this simple fact - if you dont use it, you lose it. The cognitive damage these tools will create wont be largely visible on a macro-scale for a few more years yet. But people are eventually going to realise, all this work (pre off-loading to LLMs) once geared the brain to work in a particular kind of way that results in the generation of ideas for inventions to yield innovations and so on... Personally Im only strictly hiring people who have not been exposed to the LLM-virus / people who are extremely disciplined with their use about it (which is difficult to determine).
  - problynawt 7mo ago
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- move-on-by 7mo ago
  I’ve seen this too, but mostly with the ‘team lead’ seniors- the ones interested in the management track. On the other hand, a SE2 was asking me for help with something that was way off track from what they should have been doing. This isn’t a new SE2, but someone who seems the have topped out as an SE2. Anyways, they were not understanding anything I was pointing them towards, so I got frustrated and just gave them the exact prompt to feed into their AI. The AI fixed it for them. They were amazed by the result, but should have been horrified by their uselessness instead.
fooker 7mo ago
The use of junior devs is to slowly evolve into senior devs, managers, and founders. We were just pretending otherwise, now it is explicit. I bet the number of successful junior devs is going to keep going up while the number of people coasting slowly tends to zero.
mirawelner 7mo ago
I mean just as a counterpoint: I am a Junior dev (graduated in 2022) and I am gainfully employed at the McGowan institute, earning an okay salary, with colleagues who actively use LLMs, but there is zero talk of firing me or laying me off due of LLMs. I personally avoid LLMs for most things other than: 1) Google search which actually works 2) translating MATLAB, which I have never learned (and probably won't ever) There is a whole team of Junior devs, and actually on Friday I got an email asking if I could refer another junior/entry level. Granted it was for a 1 year contract, but still. I really do not get this hype.
borroka 7mo ago
This weekend, I received confirmation that, for data analysis and modeling, coding agents represent a qualitative leap forward comparable to the widespread adoption of personal computers. I stopped doing scientific research years ago, but before moving on to other things, I had, like many others, I imagine, certain problems that I wanted to study, but given the lack of time and other concerns, I would never have picked them up again. I launched Codex, and it managed to untangle old files and analyses, find datasets that I didn't know where they had ended up, launch analyses under my guidance, and build visualizations that would have taken me days, if not weeks, to complete. Of course, I have experience, I know what needs to be done, and I had to correct some errors made by Codex (I am paying for Codex and Gemini now, but I could go back to paying for Claude too), but I was amazed by the quality of the analyses. To give an example, I had a dataset of weather observations that I had downloaded from a website years ago, hundreds of time series across weather stations. Codex managed to recover the missing time series, even though the website is no longer active, by first comparing the downloaded data with the data I had, and then also finding a digital elevation model. Now I will guide Codex in developing a model of extreme events that will allow me to have a spatio-temporal model of extreme events that, without Codex, I would never have had the time or inclination to build.
vivzkestrel 7mo ago
- i dont see a single page where i can see the articles at one glance - can you add an index page that shows the list of every post ever written? this page requires too many hoops to navigate https://beabetterdev.com/2026/02/ https://beabetterdev.com/2026/02/
doginasuit 7mo ago
I'd find it very understandable if true. I also think there will be some junior devs that it will supercharge, and they will eventually make some of the things we only dreamed about. If you don't actually enjoy coding but are starting out as a coder, it's probably not going to help. If you are thirsty to understand and do things, it is an incredible time to start out.
sanjananb 7mo ago
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nxpnsv 7mo ago
I think the title is a step too far, but there is also solid advice if you read past it. Read past it.
bitfilped 7mo ago
No company will expect (or even want) any employee to be using AI 5 years out with the exception of small specialized models that certainly won't be replacing any jobs. Idk what it is about people since covid... Tech bubbles aren't new, AI isn't new, moderate jumps in technolgy advancements isn't new. This whole scene of terrifying young practitioners as they're entering into their fields and telling students they are wasting their time and that all the jobs of the future will be gone isn't just silly, it's actively more destructive than the AI tech itself.
JOHN34567 7mo ago
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StacyRawls 7mo ago
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tom_m 7mo ago
It should be making them more useful. They can ask it questions to learn! It's an amazing source of information. Far more convenient than Googling and reading. It's interactive Google, interactive custom tailored education. Insane.
dent9 7mo ago
This post was written by ai
Watson4321 7mo ago
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218 points by beabetterdev 7mo ago

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 7mo ago
I do agree it’s a great tool, so much better than trying to hope and pray someone on the internet can help you with “I don’t understand this line of code.” However, it’s got a lot of downsides too.
DJBunnies 7mo ago
Not in my experience. They just regurgitate code, and juniors don’t know if/why it’s good or bad and consequently can’t field questions on their PR. “It’s what the LLM said.” - Great. Now go learn it and do it again yourself.
- danielbln 7mo ago
  I always say "own the output". No need to do it by hand but you better damn well research _why_ the AI chose a solution, and what alternatives there are and why not something else, how it works and so on. Ask the AI, ask a seperate agent/model, Google for it, I don't care, but "I don't know the LLM told me" is not acceptable.
- tpmoney 7mo ago
  Unless your company is investing in actually teaching your junior devs, this isn't really all that different than the days when jr devs just copied and pasted something out of stack overflow, or blindly copied entire class files around just to change 1 line in what could otherwise have been a shared method. And if your company is actually investing time and resources into teaching your junior devs, then whether they're copying and pasting from stack overflow, from another file in the project or from AI doesn't really matter. In my experience it is the very rare junior dev that can learn what's good or bad about a given design on their own. Either they needed to be paired with a sr dev to look at things and explain why they might not want to something a given way, or they needed to wind up having to fix the mess they made when their code breaks something. AI doesn't change that.
- HDThoreaun 7mo ago
  This just means you have bad juniors who aren’t interested in learning.
  - alternatex 7mo ago
    It's easier to be lazy now more than ever. Hard to blame them because the temptation to deliver and prove oneself as a junior is always high. I can't count how many seniors have forgotten what it means to understand the code they're merging since AI coding tools became popular. So long as businesses only value quantity the odds are stacked against juniors.
- slibhb 7mo ago
  For me, the hardest part of software development was learning incantations. These are not interesting, they're conventions that you have to learn to get stuff to work. AI makes this process easier. If people use AI to generate code they don't understand, that will bite them. But it's an incredibly tool for explaining code and teaching you boring, rote incantations.
techpression 7mo ago
Only for people who wants be taught, this argument keeps coming up again and again but people in general doesn’t want to learn how to fish, they want the fish on a plate ready to eat, so that they can continue scrolling. I see this a lot in juniors, they are solution seekers, not problem solvers, and AI makes this difference a lot worse.
croes 7mo ago
A teacher who just gives you the solution isn’t a good teacher. You can use AI as a teacher but how many will do that?
- jatari 7mo ago
  Highly motivated people will use whatever tools they have to get better at something, whether they have a textbook, the internet or a LLM to use. The skill of the very top programmers will continue to increase with the advent of new tools.
  - croes 7mo ago
    And how many will not? For mist people it’s just a job to get money, they will put exactly as much effort in it as is necessary to produce an acceptable result
veryemartguy 7mo ago
[flagged]
TacticalCoder 7mo ago
> AI is an incredible teaching tool. It's probably better for teaching/explaining than for writing code. It is but how do you teach to people who think their new profession is being a "senior prompt engineer" (with 4 months of experience) and who believe that in 12 months there won't be any programmer left?
Thanemate 7mo ago
>AI is an incredible teaching tool. As a junior, my top issue is finding valuable learning material that isn't full of poor or outright wrong information. In the best and most generous interpretation of your statement, LLM's simply removed my need to search for the information. That doesn't mean it's not of poor quality or outright wrong.
- ndriscoll 7mo ago
  I suspect that the quality is ironically correlated with the expertise of the user (i.e. it is knowledgeable if you are knowledgeable), which puts you in a conundrum (I can report that with a couple decades of experience, LLMs are giving me high quality, correct results, but I can already see that it somehow doesn't work as well for some of my less experienced colleagues. A lot of what I've been doing over the last couple months is trying to find how to make it "just work" for them.). As a general principle, take advantage of the fact that it can easily generate stuff. If you don't know whether something is true, have it prove it. Make a PoC/test/benchmark to demonstrate what it's saying. Have it pull metrics that you have access to. Add more observability. Create feedback loops (or rather, ask it to create feedback loops). They're very good at reasoning given access to the ground truth, so give them more ability to ground themselves. They also have fantastic knowledge of public things, but no knowledge of your company, so your instructions should mostly be documentation of what's unique to your company. If it can write an instruction on its own (e.g. how to use git or kubernetes), it is a useless instruction; it already knows that. What it doesn't know is e.g. where your git server is. It also doesn't know what matters to your company: are you a startup trying to find product market fit? Are you an established company that is not allowed to break customer setups? etc. You might even be able to ask it what kinds of questions a senior might ask about how a company/team works when coming into a new job, and then see if you can answer those questions (or find someone who can). In fact, go ask chatgpt: > What are some questions a senior engineer might ask when coming into a new role to make themselves more effective? > What are some questions a principle engineer might ask when coming into a new role to make themselves more effective? > What are some questions an engineering manager might ask when coming into a new role to make themselves more effective? > What are some questions an engineering director might ask when coming into a new role to make themselves more effective?
kgeist 7mo ago
Research [0] from Anthropic about juniors learning to code with AI/without: >the AI group averaged 50% on the quiz, compared to 67% in the hand-coding group And why would they do better? There's less incentive to learn because it's so easy to offload thinking to AI. [0] https://www.anthropic.com/research/AI-assistance-coding-skills https://www.anthropic.com/research/AI-assistance-coding-skil...
gamblor956 7mo ago
Objectively speaking, students that use AI score more than a full grade point below their peers not using AI. AI makes students dumber, not smarter.
fasbiner 7mo ago
Presumably you do a lot of back-and-forth with AI, and as many other commenters have pointed out, this seems to have made you more credulous and less informed.

dangus 7mo ago

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 7mo ago

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.

sarchertech 7mo ago
It’s gonna take a long time for that to become the norm I think. I really wish I could take 5 years off while everyone figures this out.
- wreath 7mo ago
  You don't have to take 5 years off for it. Just continue same old business (assuming you don't have outside pressure to use this slop-machine) and keep your skills and judgment sharp until the tools and workflow stabilizes, and most of all, the money to fuel this hype runs out.
  - sarchertech 7mo ago
    The reason I say that is because I don’t want to deal with trying to keep things from collapsing around me while people slam in tens of thousands of lines of vibe coded slop.

verdverm 7mo ago

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 7mo ago

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.

52-6F-62 7mo ago
I'm not sure sure. I worked under people who started as juniors that way but were politically savvy. Or just ruthless. And pushed their way to the top by stealing projects, lying through their teeth, and other such tactics. They were slowing down progress because their methods involved sabotaging the progress of others because it might make their own contributions shine a little less. They were the cause of using libraries like leftPad all through business critical code, and cutting anyone down who dared to simply question why. These things cause ripples. The smartest and most capable staff leaves, what results is a churn of the same kind. But hey, they get a trip to Mexico every year and burn through millions every two years. Profit any day now.
ehnto 7mo ago
You definitely did see a difference between people who just copy pasted from stack overflow, and from people with good fundamentals. The uncomfortable truth though, is that the industry didn't need good coders, it needed a bucket load of basic web apps and it needed bums in seats. I think the irony of AI is going to be that it will make the remaining software jobs properly hard again, and implementers (ex coders) will be able to succeed with even less code knowledge than before.

recursivedoubts 7mo ago

As I tell my students: juniors, you must write the code https://htmx.org/essays/yes-and/ 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.

Thanemate 7mo ago
The issue stems from 2 things: 1) People hearing "an LLM is as smart as a junior" and actually opting for the LLM subscription price instead of hiring a junior 2) The gap between senior and junior in terms of performance has become larger, since the senior devs had their hands get dirty for years typing stuff out manually AND also tackling challenges. This generation of junior-mid developers will have a significant portion of the "typing stuff" chopped off, and we're still pretending that this will end up being fine.
- jnwatson 7mo ago
  I think your second point is interesting, and it has actually already happened a couple of times. It used to be a lot easier to find devs that knew assembly and could navigate call stacks through memory by hand because a lot of folks had to learn that to get their job done. Now higher level languages have mostly eliminated that level of operation. The same applies to infosec roles. It is 10x harder for junior infosec folks than 20 years ago because there are a bunch of skills you need in infosec that today's mainline dev experience doesn't need, but were more common a while ago. Case in point, I remember working with a partner company's junior engineer on some integration. They needed some hard-coded constant changed and time was of the essence. I told them to change a couple bytes in the elf binary directly. They looked at me like I was a wizard. I thought it was a fairly pedestrian skill having grown up reversing computer game save files.
  - mycall 7mo ago
    Hex editors are a black box to most 99% devs these days. I noticed their use falling off once code-signing came into use.

garyfirestorm 7mo ago

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.

sarchertech 7mo ago
I hope you don’t have actual users.
- nkmnz 7mo ago
  Don't worry, he works for the DoW.
  - garyfirestorm 7mo ago
    lol no i don't.

adamtaylor_13 7mo ago

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.

risyachka 7mo ago
>> who literally hadn't even completed an HTML course. so what is their value? proxy your requests to ai?
- adamtaylor_13 7mo ago
  Their value is it's my brother and I need a human brain to be able to slowly morph into a developer over time. So I suppose, sorta, yes. The expectation is to proxy AI requests while building a mental framework for how software is built.
troad 7mo ago
> As with everything in life: you can choose to hard route or you can choose the easy route and your results will follow accordingly. Hard agree, but probably not in the way you're implying. It's the difficult things that make life fun and interesting. A life spent going from one easy thing to another is a life barely lived at all.
- raw_anon_1111 7mo ago
  From a professional standpoint, I’ve never found “enjoyment” from coding. I enjoy every part of the process of getting business goals from talking to stakeholders -> completed project with coding being the necessary evil. Funny enough, I started working in 1996 professionally (and had been a hobbyist for six years before going to college). But it was only between 2012-2016 that I was a ticket taker without working with the end user directly - everything I’ve done has been B2B. GenAI (and working remotely since 2020) has made me enjoy every part of my job.

re-thc 7mo ago

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 7mo ago

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.

deleted 7mo ago

[deleted]

pluc 7mo ago

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.

microgpt 7mo ago
I don't expect them to realise that until some time after it actually happens. When it remains a future hypothetical, it won't be accounted for.
VoodooJuJu 7mo ago
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PetoU 7mo ago
fwiw 90% of software is reinventing the wheel. 80% of devs have an itch to "rewrite from scratch". AI will deduplicate all of this
- pluc 7mo ago
  This is fine. How else do you learn but by taking things apart and rebuilding them? This obsession with productivity is incompatible with onboarding new talent. Having 1000 versions of the same concept is exactly what progress is.
  - skeledrew 7mo ago
    > 1000 versions of the same concept That sounds beyond wasteful.
    - pluc 7mo ago

jmyeet 7mo ago

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 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K1WrHH-WtaA

tinyhouse 7mo ago

AI made juniors without potential useless, not all juniors.

13415 7mo ago

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

paulsutter 7mo ago

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.

JackSlateur 7mo ago
I watched star wars, so I know how to fly a spaceship

nextstepfan 7mo ago

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.

zsoltkacsandi 7mo ago
I agree. But it’s not about that they have inflated value but it comes down to how “modern” software producing organizations work. Product managers and C-level people do not know what they are doing either. Most people are part of the “software engineering” theater, recruiters are recruiting, manager are managing, software developers are developing software, all of them just to get paid or gain status in the org. Most of the values come from that handful people who can really deliver.
- whattheheckheck 7mo ago
  Yeah read Software and Mind by Andrei Sorin
  - slopinthebag 7mo ago
    > The mechanistic myth is the belief that everything can be described as a neat hierarchical structure of things within things. And few of us realize that our entire culture is based on this fallacy. While the world consists of complex, interacting structures, we prefer to treat every phenomenon as a simple, isolated structure. > Through our software pursuits, the mechanistic myth has spread beyond its academic origins, and is now affecting every aspect of human existence. In just one generation, it has expanded from worthless theories of mind and society (behaviour- ism, structuralism, universal grammar, etc.) to worthless concepts in the field of programming (structured programming, object-oriented pro- gramming, the relational database model, etc.) to worthless software-related activities that we all have to perform. > What is worse, our mechanistic beliefs have permitted powerful software elites to arise. While appearing to help us enjoy the benefits of software, the elites are in fact preventing us from creating and using software effectively. By invoking mechanistic software principles, they are fostering ignorance in software-related matters and inducing dependence on their systems. > Increasingly, in one occupation after another, all we need to know is how to operate some software systems that are based on mechanistic principles. But our minds are capable of non- mechanistic knowledge. So, when the elites force us to depend on their software, they exploit us in two ways: by preventing us from creating better, non-mechanistic software; and by preventing us from using the superior, non-mechanistic capabilities of our minds. > The ultimate consequence of our mechanistic culture, then, is the degradation of minds. If we restrict ourselves to mechanistic performance, our non-mechanistic capabilities remain un- developed. The world is becoming more and more complex, yet we see only its simple, mechanistic aspects. So we cope perhaps with the mechanistic problems, but the complex, non-mechanistic ones remain unsolved, and may eventually destroy us. Wow, I'm immediately hooked. The book is free online as well to download.

palad1n 7mo ago

tl;dr ask why

BobbyJo 7mo ago

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.

xorgun 7mo ago
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sunir 7mo ago
Agreed. We are still in a capital crunch so overhiring is out of fashion. People don’t remember the early 90s or the dot.bust when the same things were said. Kraft 1977 Programmers and Managers talked about this if I recall. Still the best alternate take on our industry I have ever read.
- fdgg 7mo ago
  The most likely explanation for "AI layoffs" is not that AI has caused a dramatic jump in productivity - its more that managers are running out of creativity in relation to revenue-generating and cost-reducing projects and henceforth have no use for the surplus of labour. Its much easier to maximize the stock price in the short-term by riding the 'AI' wave. There seems to be some nonsensical belief that there exists this endless stream of positive NPV projects to take. No... reality is not like that.
  - sunir 7mo ago
    That’s a strong point. I interpret that: Covid created needs that weren’t permanent and also caused overinvestment to address digitalization and remote life needs to support lockdown as well as predictions for a permanent change in the future. Either way a lot of the work to be done in software is done for a while.
7mo ago

weatherlite 7mo ago

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.

zozbot234 7mo ago
> 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. It will always be preferable to work on an understandable codebase, because that maximizes the AI's affordances too. And then the AI can explain things to you. A skilled human will always have a lot of solid knowledge relating to their hyper-specific niche that isn't part of your average general purpose AI, so humans will obviously have a key role to play still.
oddsockmachine 7mo ago
I'm already seeing this in the company I recently joined: 80-90% of code is generated/prompted. Big PRs, very little review or oversight. Absolutely nobody considering long-term architecture (and IMO nobody capable of such). In general, there's very little critical thinking involved at any stage, just throw error messages back into the LLM, rinse and repeat. I'm hoping there's a world where people with skills are useful in getting these projects back on track, but perhaps as a society we're learning to accept this reduction in quality.
- weatherlite 7mo ago
  And how do u sum up the tradeoffs so far, or is it too early to tell ? Do u see lots of unacceptable shit making into production that wouldn't have before A.I for example ?

ivanjermakov 7mo ago

Copying homework and cheating at exams don't make student learn. It takes time to become a junior too. Emerging tech landscape could affect skills and knowledge that is expected from entry level job applicants.

raw_anon_1111 7mo ago

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.

sega_sai 7mo ago

I recently read a similar discussion in the context of AI in science and PhD students. And the point the author was making that the goal of having PhD students is NOT to produce academic research, but to train people. I think the same idea applies here. Somebody still needs to train people, and the companies will probably need to ensure that they have resources for that, as there will not be enough senior people for all the tasks.

selimthegrim 7mo ago
I understand that but try getting hired in industry as a PhD with that argument.
whattheheckheck 7mo ago
Back to fuedalism we go!

hluska 7mo ago

> If I’m reviewing your code and I ask you why you went with a certain approach, and you tell me “the AI suggested it”, I’ve immediately lost confidence in you. I’ve experienced similar things and so understand the feeling, but this is poor leadership. If someone on your team makes it all the way to a code review and still thinks ‘the AI suggested it’, you failed to train them, failed to set expectations and they have justifiably lost more confidence in you than vice versa. If we analyze the rest of the article through the lens of weak leadership, it sounds less like an AI problem and more like a corporate leadership problem.

thallavajhula 7mo ago

Just another silly uninformed take.

FpUser 7mo ago

Problem is not making juniors useless. They kind of are by definition. Problem is that now they have very little chance to become seniors.

raegis 7mo ago
"juniors are useless": Maybe y'all should consider updating this hyberbolic language. Nobody is born a "senior developer", so surely all of your training as a "junior" is not useless. There is always a disconnect between what younger people know and what older people expect them to know, so training is required almost universally.
- FpUser 7mo ago
  >"juniors are useless. Maybe y'all should consider updating this hyberbolic language" Don't be so dense. It is a figure of speech. We all were useless at some point. Nothing to be ashamed of

mh2266 7mo ago

This post, ironically, seems very likely to have been written by an LLM :/ "it's not x, but y", with bonus em-dash: > your value as a developer is not in your ability to ship code. It’s in your ability to look at code "But here’s the thing." "And honestly?"

opem 7mo ago
I think so. Just go to the homepage, all of the thumbnails are AI generated with clickbaity titles.
adampunk 7mo ago
There appears to be a cottage industry in pumping out "LLMs will eat your skills; listen to me, the wise senior engineer with the same anxieties" pieces. https://www.ivanturkovic.com/2026/02/25/ai-made-writing-code-easier-engineering-harder/ https://www.ivanturkovic.com/2026/02/25/ai-made-writing-code... That's the same style. Plays well there, tho, it seems. Even when an agent writes it.
i_think_so 7mo ago
Somebody said "once you learn to recognize this pattern you'll see it everywhere." I was half hoping I never would; now that I do I'm sure it will be depressing to read most web content generated after 2023. Sigh. This is why humanity can't have nice things -- it's not X (because we break them like careless children), but Y (we make cheap crappy copies that push out the good and the real). But here's the thing. No, actually, there is no other thing. This is our future now. And honestly? I think I'll go talk that that guy I knew in high school and see if he's willing to train a new welder.

pelasaco 7mo ago

"AI is making junior devs useless" is a dangerous and incorrect conclusion. If this idea is repeated too often, people may start to believe it and even quit studying computer science altogether. First of all, developers who only learn to code in a short bootcamp are often not well prepared — but that was already true before AI. In the past, many junior developers were students who were learning programming while studying, not just people who took a quick Python course on Udemy. Instead of declaring junior developers useless, we should raise the standard: learn how to code properly, how to maintain code, understand networks, and build strong foundations in math and computer science. A well-trained junior developer is still extremely valuable and will always be needed.

lenerdenator 7mo ago

You're going to have to do the unthinkable: Invest in the training of your junior employees. The cost of generating code is now laughable, so that's not the economic value brought to the table by a junior engineer, or really, any engineer. The value is now generated by knowing what code is good code. You're going to have to have talks, book clubs, hackathons, and the like to get your juniors to know what good code is. Do they know what design patterns are? How about good architecture? If they can't name a few design patterns, you're not investing enough.

kshahkshah 7mo ago

I see so much creativity coming from young developers I just can’t agree. Yes most developers in the past 20 years who were only chasing big tech money were useless. Good riddance

amelius 7mo ago

It also makes junior devs unobtainable. Because who in their right mind is going to start a career in CS these days?

holtkam2 7mo ago
Idk, anyone who wants to understand and apply the most powerful and transformative technology in human history…?
- amelius 7mo ago
  1. There isn't much to understand about this technology. 2. Unlike in the past, you can't program the technology without having billions in cash.

mdavid626 7mo ago

It feels like to me that junior devs don’t understand what they even need to learn. They just use agentic coding to get things done, without any deeper knowledge. The worst is, they think they know exactly what they need to learn, and also think they can make good decisions.

rishabhaiover 7mo ago

Every week, I read an article on the consequences of reliable coding agents in SWE industry. All such discussions on HN leads to a fundamental suspicion of the empirical scaling laws of LLMs or the infinite greed and short-sightedness of the market in inflating a bubble. I'm tired.

borzi 7mo ago

This is 100% an issue on the side of the senior developers. Imagine saying "these juniors are useless" because you are making them work in assembly, but C has just been released. You are giving them menial work that is no longer required to do by humans. Instead of giving them the task "update these email templates", the norm should be: "create this new service that automates an internal process". They will make mistakes and they will learn - but what they will be doing is going to be very useful and also give them chance to grow the necessary skills for this new era, with the supervision of a senior.

JeremyNT 7mo ago
I think the issue is they used to make progress at a snails pace and you had plenty of teachable moments. Now anybody can vibe code something that seems to work with a million landmines. How can they develop the intuition around this given that they don't know what they don't know? How can we review it and help them get there? Maybe we can figure it out, but I'm not sure it's easy or obvious.
- borzi 7mo ago
  By making them walk into the landmines and forcing them to fix it - that is how everyone became a good programmer. It's just the scope that has changed.

daxfohl 7mo ago

Nah, it makes teams useless. Maybe not quite yet, but soon, one engineer will be able to do a few sprint teams' worth of work, and deliver features orders of magnitude faster than a team working in parallel. Yeah, generally at first this will be seniors only. But before long, a junior will be able to come in and learn to manage one sprint team's worth of work under the guidance of a senior and partnered with a PM, and grow the product from there. Long term, I imagine 90% workforce reduction will be the norm. Just about all software is a rinse and repeat of some other software, not much true innovation, so picking and choosing and implementing some other software's feature into your own will start to become trivial single-day projects from start to finish. Hopefully AI creates some new industries that SWEs can roll into, but I'm feeling more doomer every day.

borzi 7mo ago
Yeap, and people are still forcing juniors to make small code changes when they should be learning by creating entire apps on their own, deploying them, etc. WITH a senior giving them feedback occasionally. I think people are going to take a while to catch on though, for better or worse....
- daxfohl 7mo ago
  Yeah, IMO one of the first things we'll see change is more of a migration back to monoliths. Right now adding a feature has to go through multiple teams, a dozen services, a coordinated implementation and deployment schedule, a Byzantine and often manual set of integration tests, etc. Yeah AI can help with that, but the point is that AI doesn't need it. On a monolith, it sucks for dev teams because parallel development at large scale is difficult and other teams' bugs can delay the launch of your unrelated project. Hence, microservices became popular. With AI, development happens so fast that it's largely serial. So there's no real coordination needed. A whole feature is one PR, one set of tests, one app to run locally if you want, one deployment, one thing to look at and roll back if there's a bug. Creates a virtuous cycle all the way up. I imagine lots of established companies will struggle migrating back to that pattern, but I have to think most new companies will head in that direction, which should let them catch up quickly. Anyway that's my take. We'll see.

guax 7mo ago

Ai might bring forward the standardisation we never had. If coding dynamics shift enough then all the opinions about libraries and engines and frameworks might get less focused on readability and more on efficiency and easy composition by Ai. Security gets outsourced to audited layers and Ai does the stupid boring jobs of gluing them together. Some developers become more specialised and niche, some pivot to product, some pivot to other areas. There are plenty of people who joined software for the payout and hate it. Plenty of people who grown to hate it over time. I've been enjoying using it to figure out toy projects but paying an API and depending on a service to code is very sour. I really hope hardware specialises and local models become good enough. Gate keeping development on centralised services would be a loss for everyone and ripe for dystopian outcomes.

opem 7mo ago

Is this writeup AI generated?

keeda 7mo ago

I maintain that in the future, any person wishing to learn any skill (not just coding!) will need to willingly eschew the use of AI when learning until they have "built the muscles". The literature is clear that repeated, hands-on practice is really the only way to build skills. I suspect the progression will be "No AI until intuition (whatever that is for that skill)" -> "Gradual use of AI to understand where it falls short" -> "AI native expert". How to actually implement this at scale is still TBD ;-) Ironically, AI will be invaluable for this e.g. as a hyper-personalized tutor but it will also present an irresistible temptation to offload the hands-on practice. We already have studies indicating the former is helpful but the latter stifles mastery. At this point I can only see self-discipline as a mechanism to willingly avoid AI. Unfortunately, our testing-oriented education system only serves to incentivize over-reliance on AI (Goodhart's Law etc.) None of our current institutions and processes are suited for what is already happening and will only accelerate from here on. Things will need to change radically. For this reason, I once predicted apprenticeships will be a thing again, and already there are signs with Microsoft's preceptorship proposal: https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3779312 https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3779312 This is highly encouraging because a tech giant is not only acknowledging the problem, but proposing a solution. Not a complete solution by far but at least a start.

nerdsniper 7mo ago
I learned Calculus despite having access to Mathematica, TI-89/92/CX-CAS, and WolframAlpha. I still had to do hundreds of derivations and integrations and manual manipulation of separable differential equations entirely by hand to learn it. But these tools made it easier for me to understand what I was doing wrong. So, I agree with you, but it's also already been true for decades now with other tools.
- array_key_first 7mo ago
  All these tools only replace mechanical aspects, not thinking ones. AI is truly unique and unprecedented in that way. A spellchecker is purely mechanical, it just helps you spell your essay right. But it won't make your essay good, or help you write the right essay.

h4kunamata 7mo ago

The silver line is not to avoid AI but to use it wisely, and this is coming from somebody who used to hate AI. I am not a Python developer or developer for the matter but Perplexity AI did help me to understand the bsic of Python for API requests and get projects delivery with 94% code coverage and vulnerability free. AI also reduced the time spent with Ansible playbook generation, but I do know Ansible, I do know Linux, homelab is my hobby so I am not just doing copy and paste. I review whatever it generates and correct it when required. In the companies I have worked and work, I see developers themselves confessing "I used AI, it works but idk how"! AI itself does not make you useless, only and only if you used it as a smart search engine. If you are doing copy/paste, you are going to get so screwed professionally speaking. Folks are no longer learning and what they are doing, AI can do on its own. That is making some developer useless.

cryptonector 7mo ago

> > For someone like you, who likely has years of experience without LLMs, your brain totally understands good code/bad code, good architecture, and just general intuition around code and systems. LLMs must be an absolute gamechanger. But for someone like me who is starting out in this field, how am I supposed to build the years of experience and intuition that comes from manually writing code and building systems when companies are expecting AI to be used from here on out? Answer: juniors need to work with seniors, and the seniors need to teach the juniors, and the juniors need to learn to use LLMs to learn, not just to do the work.

fragmede 7mo ago
I've been teaching a few people to vibecode, and it depends on the person learning. The honest answer is as someone who's been in the industry multiple decades, a lot of my knowledge isn't necessary to be useful at vibecoding. I was about to go into a long discussion about cryptography and public private keys, and prime numbers and RSA and gpg and etc but we short circuited that discussion by asking ChatGPT about it and asking it to dumb down the explanation it gave to a couple of salient sentences and I added some flavor and we moved on with our lives.

ramon156 7mo ago

Next year I'm going to experience my first junior, which is crazy considering I have 3 YOE. Nonetheless I'm very curious what kind of graduates come out of the current education

rhubarbtree 7mo ago

I don’t know if this is related, but the standards of CS university courses in the UK are objectively way below what they were 25 years ago. You can compare two syllabuses from the same course and the difference is shocking. It may be AI has raised the bar, but also that junior devs out of uni are just much worse than they used to be.

fdgg 7mo ago
Youre not wrong. Theres been a lot stuff going in the UK that goes back to high-school level stuff. Grade inflation etc. Its a disaster.

prpl 7mo ago

I think this is true, but I think it’s quite possible an inversion could come

sotix 7mo ago

AI has made senior engineers useless to me. I have purposefully asked senior engineers specific questions to get their insight on a matter only to have them tell me, "here's what our internal AI tool said". This has occurred countless times. I find that staff and principal engineers have remained extraordinarily valuable as teachers. Our junior devs have been exceptional and are eager to learn. Our seniors have become lazier and stopped being as generous with their knowledge.

fdgg 7mo ago
Its a disaster. Remember this simple fact - if you dont use it, you lose it. The cognitive damage these tools will create wont be largely visible on a macro-scale for a few more years yet. But people are eventually going to realise, all this work (pre off-loading to LLMs) once geared the brain to work in a particular kind of way that results in the generation of ideas for inventions to yield innovations and so on... Personally Im only strictly hiring people who have not been exposed to the LLM-virus / people who are extremely disciplined with their use about it (which is difficult to determine).
- problynawt 7mo ago
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move-on-by 7mo ago
I’ve seen this too, but mostly with the ‘team lead’ seniors- the ones interested in the management track. On the other hand, a SE2 was asking me for help with something that was way off track from what they should have been doing. This isn’t a new SE2, but someone who seems the have topped out as an SE2. Anyways, they were not understanding anything I was pointing them towards, so I got frustrated and just gave them the exact prompt to feed into their AI. The AI fixed it for them. They were amazed by the result, but should have been horrified by their uselessness instead.

fooker 7mo ago

The use of junior devs is to slowly evolve into senior devs, managers, and founders. We were just pretending otherwise, now it is explicit. I bet the number of successful junior devs is going to keep going up while the number of people coasting slowly tends to zero.

mirawelner 7mo ago

I mean just as a counterpoint: I am a Junior dev (graduated in 2022) and I am gainfully employed at the McGowan institute, earning an okay salary, with colleagues who actively use LLMs, but there is zero talk of firing me or laying me off due of LLMs. I personally avoid LLMs for most things other than: 1) Google search which actually works 2) translating MATLAB, which I have never learned (and probably won't ever) There is a whole team of Junior devs, and actually on Friday I got an email asking if I could refer another junior/entry level. Granted it was for a 1 year contract, but still. I really do not get this hype.

borroka 7mo ago

This weekend, I received confirmation that, for data analysis and modeling, coding agents represent a qualitative leap forward comparable to the widespread adoption of personal computers. I stopped doing scientific research years ago, but before moving on to other things, I had, like many others, I imagine, certain problems that I wanted to study, but given the lack of time and other concerns, I would never have picked them up again. I launched Codex, and it managed to untangle old files and analyses, find datasets that I didn't know where they had ended up, launch analyses under my guidance, and build visualizations that would have taken me days, if not weeks, to complete. Of course, I have experience, I know what needs to be done, and I had to correct some errors made by Codex (I am paying for Codex and Gemini now, but I could go back to paying for Claude too), but I was amazed by the quality of the analyses. To give an example, I had a dataset of weather observations that I had downloaded from a website years ago, hundreds of time series across weather stations. Codex managed to recover the missing time series, even though the website is no longer active, by first comparing the downloaded data with the data I had, and then also finding a digital elevation model. Now I will guide Codex in developing a model of extreme events that will allow me to have a spatio-temporal model of extreme events that, without Codex, I would never have had the time or inclination to build.

vivzkestrel 7mo ago

- i dont see a single page where i can see the articles at one glance - can you add an index page that shows the list of every post ever written? this page requires too many hoops to navigate https://beabetterdev.com/2026/02/ https://beabetterdev.com/2026/02/

doginasuit 7mo ago

I'd find it very understandable if true. I also think there will be some junior devs that it will supercharge, and they will eventually make some of the things we only dreamed about. If you don't actually enjoy coding but are starting out as a coder, it's probably not going to help. If you are thirsty to understand and do things, it is an incredible time to start out.

sanjananb 7mo ago

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nxpnsv 7mo ago

I think the title is a step too far, but there is also solid advice if you read past it. Read past it.

bitfilped 7mo ago

No company will expect (or even want) any employee to be using AI 5 years out with the exception of small specialized models that certainly won't be replacing any jobs. Idk what it is about people since covid... Tech bubbles aren't new, AI isn't new, moderate jumps in technolgy advancements isn't new. This whole scene of terrifying young practitioners as they're entering into their fields and telling students they are wasting their time and that all the jobs of the future will be gone isn't just silly, it's actively more destructive than the AI tech itself.

JOHN34567 7mo ago

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StacyRawls 7mo ago

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tom_m 7mo ago

It should be making them more useful. They can ask it questions to learn! It's an amazing source of information. Far more convenient than Googling and reading. It's interactive Google, interactive custom tailored education. Insane.

dent9 7mo ago

This post was written by ai

Watson4321 7mo ago

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