8 ms·

AI didn't erase the junior engineer's value, it increased it it

91 points by franciscomt 1mo ago

franciscomt 1mo ago
Author here. My last post on this reached the front page, and the main objection was that after AI, the junior's marginal value is gone: if a junior just passes specs to an AI tool and PRs back, why pay the salary? That deserved a real answer, so I wrote this post. Short version: that describes a problem with how the role is structured, not what juniors can do. Push back welcome.
- vee-kay 1mo ago
  If an intern can do the work of a technical lead, architect, software designer, or project manager, why do we need such expensive resources? Just fire all the seniors (including the CxOs) and let the interns run the company as lowest-paid temporary contractors, with the help of AI. /s
  - franciscomt 1mo ago
    They surely cannot. But they can own simple problems end to end.
- dzonga 1mo ago
  my take from this article - there's a point you miss. is the organization product driven ? because usually that changes how engineers solve or approach problems. a few organizations are product driven. if it's product led - and every engineer no matter the level are supposed to understand the business and the requirements that drive value i.e create their own tickets etc - then yeah the value of the junior engineer stays the same or goes up. with other orgs - where product managers act like high priests and everything has to go through Jira. then the value of not just junior engineers but engineers in general has been always at an all time low.
  - franciscomt 1mo ago
    That’s a good point. My whole career has been in product/tech led companies.
petcat 1mo ago
I think it is less about junior/mid engineers, and more just about the kinds of work inexperienced/cheap developers are often doing: assembly line, JIRA-ticket-taker type development. This is especially impacting Indian tech workers in the US [0] since these are often the types of roles that InfoSys and other foreign tech consulting firms are staffing. The new $100,000 fee to sponsor an H1B visa has made it difficult to justify hiring foreign tech workers when most of the time they are just going to be using American LLMs to do their work anyway. [0] https://thefederal.com/category/news/h1b-visa-indian-tech-workers-return-india-us-jobs-245525 https://thefederal.com/category/news/h1b-visa-indian-tech-wo...
- throwatdem12311 1mo ago
  Good riddance. Worked with many offshored firms before, from all over the world. The work was subpar before and it’s even worse now. Now I can fire off agents ona remote box to do the grunt work and open PRs, then just prompt to review/iterate it. No timezone timezone delays or language barriers. Nearly instant feedback. Coding is solved. Engineering is not. Catch up or be left behind.
  - birdsongs 1mo ago
    > Good riddance. > Coding is solved. Engineering is not. Catch up or be left behind. I'm really grateful for my company's culture. Reading replies like this, I remember how easy it is to forget how atrocious that can be elsewhere. Thanks for the perspective and reminder.
    - hactually 1mo ago
      how do you mean? surely you're paid for delivering product not coding? if it is the latter, I too would love to be paid for recreational coding
      - birdsongs 1mo ago
        You misunderstood my reply. I'm talking about culture, not engineering or coding. I'm just grateful I don't work with people that say "good riddance" to blanket foreign talent bans, and "catch up or get left behind" to fellow engineers. That doesn't sound like a nice place to work? Is all I'm saying.
throwatdem12311 1mo ago
> The junior engineer executes it, which nowadays means prompting it to an AI tool, and creating a pull request (PR). The PR receives feedback from more senior engineers. The junior engineer gets the feedback and takes it to the AI tool again, proposing changes. Yeah this part should not exist anymore. It doesn’t where I work. When I get a PR I just ask an agent to make the proposed changes. There is absolutely zero incentive for me to give feedback for you to give to an agent when I can give it to an agent myself. Coding isn’t the job anymore. It’s understanding systems and architecture design, and ownership of what you work on. Being able to design solutions, understand them, deliver them and support them in production is the job now. Engineering is still engineering. End to end ownership is the job.
- franciscomt 1mo ago
  I agree. Although I think that was never the job. Even without AI, the practice of subdividing work into coding tasks was not a good one. AI just made it obvious.
  - bonzini 1mo ago
    Even if AI does the coding, I cannot understand the architecture of a change unless you split it in individual tasks that are "as small as possible but no smaller". And even if AI does the code review, the architecture review falls onto me.
- literallyroy 1mo ago
  Making changes to someone else’s PR (other than extremely trivial ones) feels like they don’t have much ownership. People often have a reason for doing things the way they did and skipping over them seems like a mistake.
  - throwatdem12311 1mo ago
    We do architecture reviews now. Code reviews are going away because agents handle it. When I ask an agent to do a code change for a PR, it’s because it’s not something I think the other engineer really should waste their time on. It’s on the same level as nitpicking what lines the braces go on before we had auto-formatters and lint checkers in CI. Other staff engineers I rarely even see their code. I trust them to be able to review and deliver and support their own code and communicate breaking changes. Knowledge gets disseminated at weekly architecture reviews, in person. Offshore developers under me have their code gone over with a fine-toothed comb. They don’t own the work. They don’t support it. They can’t even speak to me without using copy pasted Claude responses that are wrong half the time anyway. I have zero qualms with “going over them”.
lelanthran 1mo ago
> If the assumption is that AI is going to radically simplify the technical portion of the role, then the people who have started their careers with AI will be in the best spot once they have acquired the experience. This doesn't make sense - AI is to allow unskilled people to produce what was previously only produced by skilled people. IOW, how does having 2 years of experience using an LLM to generate code beat having 2 months of experience? The whole point of using the LLM is that very little skill is involved; how does starting earlier with it provide an advantage? If it's as good as it is claimed to be, starting later with it won't make a single iota of difference to the generated results, compared to someone who started earlier.
- franciscomt 1mo ago
  I think it’s an oversimplification to say that using AI for se dev is a trivial skill. You can see it even now with some people chatting with Claude and others running multiple agents in a loop. There’s skill in that.
  - franciscomt 1mo ago
    But I agree that now it’s something people can catch up. The point is that I think it will make a difference if you’re someone that never coded manually vs someone that is (un)learning after having a full career pre-AI. Is not much different that people who started working with computers and others who had to learn how to deal with them late in their career.
  - lelanthran 1mo ago
    > There’s skill in that. Yeah, but it's a trivial skill that the people who learned it took maybe a week to learn it. Unless LLMs never improve, the odds are good that even less time would be needed to get up to speed in a 2030 SOTA. I mean, the whole reason for LLM usage is to produce something with little to no skill needed. That's literally what they are designing it for. So it's unlikely that having a headstart using LLMs leads to any advantage.
- MISO2 1mo ago
  I'd say I'm in a better position by mostly ignoring AI so far - I haven't wasted any time or effort working out the current week's fashion in AI prompting methods that will be out of date by next week.
Retr0id 1mo ago
I find it kinda funny how everyone has such divergent opinions of who AI benefits.
dataviz1000 1mo ago
This is something I've been thinking about the last couple days: how to get junior engineers to be valuable. I developed a system to help prepare for leet coding interviews so I never feel lost under pressure solving a problem again. It is like a debugger that steps through the code showing all the values of all the variables with data visualizations that reflect the logic so I can grok what it is doing. [0] After I had the Claude build it, I started looking at the values and there were some mistakes. So, again, the coding agent ran all the code, recorded all the values, and made sure that they line up. Here is the really cool thing about that. The coding agents can't be trusted. By observing the values stepping though, what I really was doing was debugging coding agent code. It is debugging code presented in a way that is extremely simplified. What I've been thinking about yesterday and today is, can I do the same thing with a pull request? Have the coding agent run the code, capture all the values, and create a console for the reviewer to step through looking at with data visualizations that abstractly represent that code. Two things. 1. Coding agents can't be trusted and 2. reviewing code is very difficult. But is it possible to use coding agents to make reviewing code easy for humans? I think so. That would be a great way for junior engineers to be extremely useful. They only have to step through the code and make sure that all the values line up. [0] https://adamsohn.com/algoviz/ https://adamsohn.com/algoviz/
- 0x696C6961 1mo ago
  I've dreamt about pernosco (rr) style traces being available for tests in PRs. Imagine a DST setup where the PR shows diffs of deterministic test execution traces (I have no idea what these diffs would look like)
- WhyIsItAlwaysHN 1mo ago
  Is this just an ad for the product? How is this connected specifically to junior engineers? Is it implying that they cannot debug code without this kind of tool while more experienced people can?
  - dataviz1000 1mo ago
    There is no product! Yesterday claude code built a console that steps through algorithms: one shot. There was a bug with a value being incorrect. I thought this would be a great way to automated visualizing and stepping through code during a PR review. I'm sitting in a room with a computer by myself where I was thinking yesterday about a way that AI can add value to junior engineers. I see a post and discussion about junior engineer's value so I shared what I'm think and working on. Hopefully I'm contributing to the conversation here and I can get feedback good or bad about how to approach improving junior engineer's value.
polanyer 1mo ago
Such profound thought. Almost on the level of Hegel.
ericdykstra 1mo ago
AI didn't X, it Y. Where Y is write this post.
olsondv 1mo ago
It largely depends on the person. We have several junior engineers who cannot solve a problem without AI. When AI can’t solve it, they just keep trying and failing. And I mean weeks to months late. Then rinse and repeat on the next task. It used to be that they would have been forced to seek help from a senior engineer. Combine the teaching with a real struggle is what makes them better. As it is now, they aren’t being taught and they’re not learning from what the AI is producing because they don’t understand it. The produced code is a black box, and the AI’s development is a black box too. All they know is that running it produces something like what they asked for. They have no idea about failure modes which is a fundamental concept of engineering. The worst part is that AI is covering up their deficiencies. They don’t know what skills they lack. They don’t even know what skills are required because they haven’t put the effort in. There are obviously good junior engineers that are using AI judiciously and not as a crutch. They’re the ones who still interact with seniors to get help and actually learn. They would have been successful without AI too. These are the ones the author is talking about. In my experience, the momentum is moving towards the worse type of junior the more AI is adopted. Unless that changes, it will erase their value.
- yolo3000 1mo ago
  This is the direction many engineers (seniors included) are facing if they mostly rely on AI. You lose your skills, you become detached. We will all become 'architects'.
- jtrn 1mo ago
  [flagged]
  - kibwen 1mo ago
    LLMs are not even remotely comparable to compilers. This attempt at analogy is neither humorous nor insightful.
    - jtrn 1mo ago
      It depends on the level of analysis. Both change the abstraction level one works at. So if you can't decode the message, I can do it for you. People believed that something important was lost by moving up one abstraction layer, because knowing the lower-level details was important, more so than having the possibility of doing more because complexities have been abstracted away for you. And almost every time in history this conflict has arisen, the stubborn people who want to stick to the "everybody should stay at the level of abstraction that I want to stay at!" have been proven wrong. So if you don't see the comparison, you lack imagination. It's the same comparison Torvald Linus made, and even though all the rabid anti-AI people try to deny that it's a valid comparison by willfully misunderstanding the comparison, it's perfectly valid. And I find both the article and the comment I responded to either ignorant of history, and worse than uninsightful, because they are just patently, historically, logically, and empirically wrong. And I'm getting tired of the arrogant senior devs, that are not a fraction as useful as they think they are, whining and complaining at younger people who are creating imperfect but useful work with AI. While the tools for AI coding are just exploding. How can you people say stuff like "They learn nothing" with a straight face is beyond me. I see people daily who use AI to solve problems and learn something in the process. I am having such a blast over the last couple of years seeing how AI development just relentlessly disproves the claims from bitter old developers who don't want to be forced to do anything useful. And when the transition is complete, the gatekeepers will be gone, and we will be left with people trying to solve real problems.
samsari 1mo ago
Sort of like how there's a running joke, "this meeting could have been an email"; I think that for all the substance I found in this "4 minutes to read" blog post, it could have been a one-sentence comment in some discussion thread somewhere instead.
- pennomi 1mo ago
  When AI learns to only use concise, meaningful words instead of words for the sake of vomiting out more tokens, I suspect we’ll have finally achieved proper AGI.
treyd 1mo ago
I couldn't disagree more. Juniors have very poor design sense and can't guide the AI to land in the right spot. Consistently on my team the developers who are the most reliant on AI are causing me the most trouble. They produce a lot of code but constantly make the same mistakes and can't seem to learn and improve their own design skills, or are doing it at a snail's pace.
- franciscomt 1mo ago
  I agree with the sentiment. But is that exclusive to junior engineers? Curious if you think that the same problem exists with senior engineers or not.
- beej71 1mo ago
  This seems to point to a future crash where we run out of people with the skills to do the work.
fph 1mo ago
We still need the good junior engineers.
GrayHerring 1mo ago
If the task is simple enough that you can throw AI at it with an intern and get it solved, then it should've been solved already in the first place. I'd argue in more mature organizations all the things that are "backlog todos" are such because there is inherent complexity that can not be solved simply by throwing tokens at it or there are too many unknown unknowns.
jt2190 1mo ago
> This summer, we assigned the problem to an intern (that’s less tenure than a junior engineer). The intern led the development of this feature. They talked to the product manager to understand the problem and requirements. They wrote the design document on how to approach it, aligned with the team, and built it. Of course they did that with the help of AI, and the team they were working with. So, interns can still produce some value. How much value? > In our product, there was a feature which had been requested for years, but had not been built yet. It wasn’t overly complex, but it was not critical. Said another way: The feature was of so little value that it was not even worth assigning to a non-AI-assisted intern! This is what most of us mean when we say “AI lowers the value of…”
- franciscomt 1mo ago
  Thanks. How do you think that lowers the value of an intern, can you explain it? You're right that pre-AI that feature would not have been given to an intern (because they wouldn't be able to own it). So pre-AI, customers had a problem, we paid the intern, but could not solve the problem. Post-AI, the same problem exist, we pay the same intern. The customer problem is solved.
  - jt2190 1mo ago
    > . How do you think that lowers the value of an intern The article shows that the market value of the intern is lower: Work was not prioritized and given to a higher-cost junior engineer. > … pre-AI that feature would not have been given to an intern (because they wouldn't be able to own it)… Meaning, a more-skilled, higher-cost employee would have to do some or all of the work. Edit: Another meaning of “worth” is a “intrinsic value”. Humans have worth in this sense.
HEmanZ 1mo ago
Every single time I see an article like this come out on hacker news I have the same reaction “sure, this year”. There is still room for juniors… in fall of 2026. Will there be in fall of 2030? If your thesis rests on LLMs and AI systems not dramatically improving over where they are today, is it worth anything?
- AnimalMuppet 1mo ago
  I'll take the other side of that. Was there room for juniors in 2020? In 1950? What was the value of a junior in a world where programming was done in assembly? How much reliable work - how much value - could you get from them? Probably less than their salary. Now, you could argue that those were days when people moved jobs a lot less, so a junior was an investment for the company, even if they weren't worth their salary yet. And that's true to at least some degree. Still, that means that what changed isn't the value of juniors, but companies' willingness to invest in the future.
  - HEmanZ 1mo ago
    In 2020 they could code to decent feature specs and handle simple features end to end. They could maintain the dashboard as features shipped and fix specific valuable but straightforward bugs. At least, the ones hired at any company I’ve worked for. This same work that ai agents already do better. Now only the top juniors are really still worth it, the ones with more nebulous ownership, communication, synthesis, drive skills. And even these I think are on their way to being consumed by ai, unless the curve flattens (totally possible too). I think my only point is that the world is moving so fast that so many “optimistic about the field” posts I see basically assume we’ve reached the end of ai agent and system capabilities. If we have then great. But I find it a really unlikely bet.
- Merad 1mo ago
  The real value of a junior engineer is that they will become a senior. That's really always been the case IME. Juniors in the first year or two of their career are routinely a net negative, maybe break even. But the thing is, unless you're making the bet that LLMs are going to _entirely_ replace human SWE, we as an industry have to maintain a pipeline to take in juniors and level them up. If we don't, we're going to be in real trouble in about 10 years.
randusername 1mo ago
I think reducing junior value to something like time to first merge is playing with fire. Semblance of value is not value, and the value increase here, if there is any, is from the AI. I trust junior + claude significantly less than I trusted pre-AI juniors. I do not think it will age well to put so much pressure on juniors to make contributions early and with mostly automated mentorship before they really understand what they are doing and why.
VCFundedGenYer 1mo ago
It's setting them up for absolute failure. They use it like a crutch and are unable to think critically or do tasks manually. I wouldn't want to hire anyone to my team with that deficiency. This article is wrong.
_the_inflator 1mo ago
"They don’t know what skills they lack. They don’t even know what skills are required because they haven’t put the effort in." This is it. Evolving into a developer role was more or less directly proportional to the effort you put in. Before AI I used to ask applicants to the department I oversaw whether they have a GitHub Account with a project to show, and bonus, which they are immensely proud of, no matter what. You had to grind and hustle, no shortcuts, and no amount of stackoverflow.com copy and paste could save you. And that leads me to two problems for the disguise of one: effort. This not only means reading and redoing simple exercises to complex projects, but committing to it instead of doom scrolling or TikTok frenzy. I reserved weekends for certain technical books and was frustrated, that there was so few time and so much book left. AI gave instant gratification a new dimension. It is horrible until AI gets as good as a perfect project from a prompt or we need to abandon it. Poor young guys, the joy of tuning out is over either by design or habit. And make no mistake. I don't blame them. We are all victims and perpetrators at the same time but on a different level.
- machiaweliczny 1mo ago
  > It is horrible until AI gets as good as a perfect project from a prompt or we need to abandon it. Getting close to it with my recent test of cursor cloud workflow. I've spent 300M tokens in a day and it achieved what I wanted. Manually would take me a month instead of day so it's not 2x it's 20x faster but project was quite simple rewrite of 20k lines of C++ and there was reference implementation. It also improved on original implementation perf wise. The problem is with fuzzy ideas for new development and with catching up with comprehension when working on something new - I guess we need better visualization tools for code. Product manager work seems like bottleneck currently and monitoring because coding can move quite fast.
adam_arthur 1mo ago
I see the complete opposite becoming the case. In a world where code can be generated rapidly, it's super critical that you have a core few set of people who really understand the macro design of the codebase and can continue to factor it well and iterate quickly. Adding more people and contributors just increases the probability that nobody really understands the structure of the codebase, it degrades into DRY and unfactored slop. The cost of reviewing other people's code is almost too high to be worthwhile now... It's much easier to just cut them out and do it yourself. A core set of very skilled people can just implement whatever change you are doing, but better, cleaner and faster. I built a fairly large and complex project with Codex and had to spend about 50% of the time factoring things down as I went into well contained modules, had a full understanding of the architecture at a high level. It would have been pretty difficult to do this if bringing in other contributors. Too many people comment about AI from the perspective of throwing feature A or B over the wall at the workplace, but anybody who has built a huge project from scratch will see how important good design is in regard to iteration speed and result quality. That being said, there are still areas where changes should be sized reasonably and human reviewed e.g. foundational or very mature software
- jjk166 1mo ago
  That makes sense from an engineering perspective, but from a business perspective you don't want the understanding to live in the heads of a small team of people. Companies own the codebase, they don't own their employees. If losing a single employee means losing the understanding for a significant chunk of the codebase, that's a serious risk. With the senior/junior model where you have a senior engineer architecting the system and a small team implementing that architecture, the understanding lives in the senior engineer's head, but it also lives in the head of the person who implemented it, and their teammates who implemented the parts that interact with it and were present for the discussions probably have enough knowledge to figure it out pretty quickly, so as long as the company doesn't lose the whole team all at once they're okay. If you make the team more productive with AI tools you can have the team do more, which still cuts down the total headcount, if to a lesser degree, but preserves the redundant understanding.
firmretention 1mo ago
I'm tired of being told what things aren't or what they don't do.
mrhottakes 1mo ago
So surely there's more demand to hire junior engineers and their salaries have gone up?
pragmatic 1mo ago
And then the senior engineer burns the f#ck out. Reviewing 100 lines of Junior dev slop was bad enough. Now 1000 lines of misguided jr dev ai slop? Ugh.
- noworld 1mo ago
  Just have claude review it.
pjmlp 1mo ago
Not sure about that, I have seen hiring frozen, as smaller teams can deliver more, and most of the tasks one could give juniors like cleaning up code, documentation, unit tests, and co, are now basically automated.

91 points by franciscomt 1mo ago

Author here. My last post on this reached the front page, and the main objection was that after AI, the junior's marginal value is gone: if a junior just passes specs to an AI tool and PRs back, why pay the salary? That deserved a real answer, so I wrote this post. Short version: that describes a problem with how the role is structured, not what juniors can do. Push back welcome.

vee-kay 1mo ago
If an intern can do the work of a technical lead, architect, software designer, or project manager, why do we need such expensive resources? Just fire all the seniors (including the CxOs) and let the interns run the company as lowest-paid temporary contractors, with the help of AI. /s
- franciscomt 1mo ago
  They surely cannot. But they can own simple problems end to end.
dzonga 1mo ago
my take from this article - there's a point you miss. is the organization product driven ? because usually that changes how engineers solve or approach problems. a few organizations are product driven. if it's product led - and every engineer no matter the level are supposed to understand the business and the requirements that drive value i.e create their own tickets etc - then yeah the value of the junior engineer stays the same or goes up. with other orgs - where product managers act like high priests and everything has to go through Jira. then the value of not just junior engineers but engineers in general has been always at an all time low.
- franciscomt 1mo ago
  That’s a good point. My whole career has been in product/tech led companies.

petcat 1mo ago

I think it is less about junior/mid engineers, and more just about the kinds of work inexperienced/cheap developers are often doing: assembly line, JIRA-ticket-taker type development. This is especially impacting Indian tech workers in the US [0] since these are often the types of roles that InfoSys and other foreign tech consulting firms are staffing. The new $100,000 fee to sponsor an H1B visa has made it difficult to justify hiring foreign tech workers when most of the time they are just going to be using American LLMs to do their work anyway. [0] https://thefederal.com/category/news/h1b-visa-indian-tech-workers-return-india-us-jobs-245525 https://thefederal.com/category/news/h1b-visa-indian-tech-wo...

throwatdem12311 1mo ago
Good riddance. Worked with many offshored firms before, from all over the world. The work was subpar before and it’s even worse now. Now I can fire off agents ona remote box to do the grunt work and open PRs, then just prompt to review/iterate it. No timezone timezone delays or language barriers. Nearly instant feedback. Coding is solved. Engineering is not. Catch up or be left behind.
- birdsongs 1mo ago
  > Good riddance. > Coding is solved. Engineering is not. Catch up or be left behind. I'm really grateful for my company's culture. Reading replies like this, I remember how easy it is to forget how atrocious that can be elsewhere. Thanks for the perspective and reminder.
  - hactually 1mo ago
    how do you mean? surely you're paid for delivering product not coding? if it is the latter, I too would love to be paid for recreational coding
    - birdsongs 1mo ago
      You misunderstood my reply. I'm talking about culture, not engineering or coding. I'm just grateful I don't work with people that say "good riddance" to blanket foreign talent bans, and "catch up or get left behind" to fellow engineers. That doesn't sound like a nice place to work? Is all I'm saying.

throwatdem12311 1mo ago

> The junior engineer executes it, which nowadays means prompting it to an AI tool, and creating a pull request (PR). The PR receives feedback from more senior engineers. The junior engineer gets the feedback and takes it to the AI tool again, proposing changes. Yeah this part should not exist anymore. It doesn’t where I work. When I get a PR I just ask an agent to make the proposed changes. There is absolutely zero incentive for me to give feedback for you to give to an agent when I can give it to an agent myself. Coding isn’t the job anymore. It’s understanding systems and architecture design, and ownership of what you work on. Being able to design solutions, understand them, deliver them and support them in production is the job now. Engineering is still engineering. End to end ownership is the job.

franciscomt 1mo ago
I agree. Although I think that was never the job. Even without AI, the practice of subdividing work into coding tasks was not a good one. AI just made it obvious.
- bonzini 1mo ago
  Even if AI does the coding, I cannot understand the architecture of a change unless you split it in individual tasks that are "as small as possible but no smaller". And even if AI does the code review, the architecture review falls onto me.
literallyroy 1mo ago
Making changes to someone else’s PR (other than extremely trivial ones) feels like they don’t have much ownership. People often have a reason for doing things the way they did and skipping over them seems like a mistake.
- throwatdem12311 1mo ago
  We do architecture reviews now. Code reviews are going away because agents handle it. When I ask an agent to do a code change for a PR, it’s because it’s not something I think the other engineer really should waste their time on. It’s on the same level as nitpicking what lines the braces go on before we had auto-formatters and lint checkers in CI. Other staff engineers I rarely even see their code. I trust them to be able to review and deliver and support their own code and communicate breaking changes. Knowledge gets disseminated at weekly architecture reviews, in person. Offshore developers under me have their code gone over with a fine-toothed comb. They don’t own the work. They don’t support it. They can’t even speak to me without using copy pasted Claude responses that are wrong half the time anyway. I have zero qualms with “going over them”.

lelanthran 1mo ago

> If the assumption is that AI is going to radically simplify the technical portion of the role, then the people who have started their careers with AI will be in the best spot once they have acquired the experience. This doesn't make sense - AI is to allow unskilled people to produce what was previously only produced by skilled people. IOW, how does having 2 years of experience using an LLM to generate code beat having 2 months of experience? The whole point of using the LLM is that very little skill is involved; how does starting earlier with it provide an advantage? If it's as good as it is claimed to be, starting later with it won't make a single iota of difference to the generated results, compared to someone who started earlier.

franciscomt 1mo ago
I think it’s an oversimplification to say that using AI for se dev is a trivial skill. You can see it even now with some people chatting with Claude and others running multiple agents in a loop. There’s skill in that.
- franciscomt 1mo ago
  But I agree that now it’s something people can catch up. The point is that I think it will make a difference if you’re someone that never coded manually vs someone that is (un)learning after having a full career pre-AI. Is not much different that people who started working with computers and others who had to learn how to deal with them late in their career.
- lelanthran 1mo ago
  > There’s skill in that. Yeah, but it's a trivial skill that the people who learned it took maybe a week to learn it. Unless LLMs never improve, the odds are good that even less time would be needed to get up to speed in a 2030 SOTA. I mean, the whole reason for LLM usage is to produce something with little to no skill needed. That's literally what they are designing it for. So it's unlikely that having a headstart using LLMs leads to any advantage.
MISO2 1mo ago
I'd say I'm in a better position by mostly ignoring AI so far - I haven't wasted any time or effort working out the current week's fashion in AI prompting methods that will be out of date by next week.

Retr0id 1mo ago

I find it kinda funny how everyone has such divergent opinions of who AI benefits.

dataviz1000 1mo ago

This is something I've been thinking about the last couple days: how to get junior engineers to be valuable. I developed a system to help prepare for leet coding interviews so I never feel lost under pressure solving a problem again. It is like a debugger that steps through the code showing all the values of all the variables with data visualizations that reflect the logic so I can grok what it is doing. [0] After I had the Claude build it, I started looking at the values and there were some mistakes. So, again, the coding agent ran all the code, recorded all the values, and made sure that they line up. Here is the really cool thing about that. The coding agents can't be trusted. By observing the values stepping though, what I really was doing was debugging coding agent code. It is debugging code presented in a way that is extremely simplified. What I've been thinking about yesterday and today is, can I do the same thing with a pull request? Have the coding agent run the code, capture all the values, and create a console for the reviewer to step through looking at with data visualizations that abstractly represent that code. Two things. 1. Coding agents can't be trusted and 2. reviewing code is very difficult. But is it possible to use coding agents to make reviewing code easy for humans? I think so. That would be a great way for junior engineers to be extremely useful. They only have to step through the code and make sure that all the values line up. [0] https://adamsohn.com/algoviz/ https://adamsohn.com/algoviz/

0x696C6961 1mo ago
I've dreamt about pernosco (rr) style traces being available for tests in PRs. Imagine a DST setup where the PR shows diffs of deterministic test execution traces (I have no idea what these diffs would look like)
WhyIsItAlwaysHN 1mo ago
Is this just an ad for the product? How is this connected specifically to junior engineers? Is it implying that they cannot debug code without this kind of tool while more experienced people can?
- dataviz1000 1mo ago
  There is no product! Yesterday claude code built a console that steps through algorithms: one shot. There was a bug with a value being incorrect. I thought this would be a great way to automated visualizing and stepping through code during a PR review. I'm sitting in a room with a computer by myself where I was thinking yesterday about a way that AI can add value to junior engineers. I see a post and discussion about junior engineer's value so I shared what I'm think and working on. Hopefully I'm contributing to the conversation here and I can get feedback good or bad about how to approach improving junior engineer's value.

polanyer 1mo ago

Such profound thought. Almost on the level of Hegel.

ericdykstra 1mo ago

AI didn't X, it Y. Where Y is write this post.

olsondv 1mo ago

It largely depends on the person. We have several junior engineers who cannot solve a problem without AI. When AI can’t solve it, they just keep trying and failing. And I mean weeks to months late. Then rinse and repeat on the next task. It used to be that they would have been forced to seek help from a senior engineer. Combine the teaching with a real struggle is what makes them better. As it is now, they aren’t being taught and they’re not learning from what the AI is producing because they don’t understand it. The produced code is a black box, and the AI’s development is a black box too. All they know is that running it produces something like what they asked for. They have no idea about failure modes which is a fundamental concept of engineering. The worst part is that AI is covering up their deficiencies. They don’t know what skills they lack. They don’t even know what skills are required because they haven’t put the effort in. There are obviously good junior engineers that are using AI judiciously and not as a crutch. They’re the ones who still interact with seniors to get help and actually learn. They would have been successful without AI too. These are the ones the author is talking about. In my experience, the momentum is moving towards the worse type of junior the more AI is adopted. Unless that changes, it will erase their value.

yolo3000 1mo ago
This is the direction many engineers (seniors included) are facing if they mostly rely on AI. You lose your skills, you become detached. We will all become 'architects'.
jtrn 1mo ago
[flagged]
- kibwen 1mo ago
  LLMs are not even remotely comparable to compilers. This attempt at analogy is neither humorous nor insightful.
  - jtrn 1mo ago
    It depends on the level of analysis. Both change the abstraction level one works at. So if you can't decode the message, I can do it for you. People believed that something important was lost by moving up one abstraction layer, because knowing the lower-level details was important, more so than having the possibility of doing more because complexities have been abstracted away for you. And almost every time in history this conflict has arisen, the stubborn people who want to stick to the "everybody should stay at the level of abstraction that I want to stay at!" have been proven wrong. So if you don't see the comparison, you lack imagination. It's the same comparison Torvald Linus made, and even though all the rabid anti-AI people try to deny that it's a valid comparison by willfully misunderstanding the comparison, it's perfectly valid. And I find both the article and the comment I responded to either ignorant of history, and worse than uninsightful, because they are just patently, historically, logically, and empirically wrong. And I'm getting tired of the arrogant senior devs, that are not a fraction as useful as they think they are, whining and complaining at younger people who are creating imperfect but useful work with AI. While the tools for AI coding are just exploding. How can you people say stuff like "They learn nothing" with a straight face is beyond me. I see people daily who use AI to solve problems and learn something in the process. I am having such a blast over the last couple of years seeing how AI development just relentlessly disproves the claims from bitter old developers who don't want to be forced to do anything useful. And when the transition is complete, the gatekeepers will be gone, and we will be left with people trying to solve real problems.

samsari 1mo ago

Sort of like how there's a running joke, "this meeting could have been an email"; I think that for all the substance I found in this "4 minutes to read" blog post, it could have been a one-sentence comment in some discussion thread somewhere instead.

pennomi 1mo ago
When AI learns to only use concise, meaningful words instead of words for the sake of vomiting out more tokens, I suspect we’ll have finally achieved proper AGI.

treyd 1mo ago

I couldn't disagree more. Juniors have very poor design sense and can't guide the AI to land in the right spot. Consistently on my team the developers who are the most reliant on AI are causing me the most trouble. They produce a lot of code but constantly make the same mistakes and can't seem to learn and improve their own design skills, or are doing it at a snail's pace.

franciscomt 1mo ago
I agree with the sentiment. But is that exclusive to junior engineers? Curious if you think that the same problem exists with senior engineers or not.
beej71 1mo ago
This seems to point to a future crash where we run out of people with the skills to do the work.

fph 1mo ago

We still need the good junior engineers.

GrayHerring 1mo ago

If the task is simple enough that you can throw AI at it with an intern and get it solved, then it should've been solved already in the first place. I'd argue in more mature organizations all the things that are "backlog todos" are such because there is inherent complexity that can not be solved simply by throwing tokens at it or there are too many unknown unknowns.

jt2190 1mo ago

> This summer, we assigned the problem to an intern (that’s less tenure than a junior engineer). The intern led the development of this feature. They talked to the product manager to understand the problem and requirements. They wrote the design document on how to approach it, aligned with the team, and built it. Of course they did that with the help of AI, and the team they were working with. So, interns can still produce some value. How much value? > In our product, there was a feature which had been requested for years, but had not been built yet. It wasn’t overly complex, but it was not critical. Said another way: The feature was of so little value that it was not even worth assigning to a non-AI-assisted intern! This is what most of us mean when we say “AI lowers the value of…”

franciscomt 1mo ago
Thanks. How do you think that lowers the value of an intern, can you explain it? You're right that pre-AI that feature would not have been given to an intern (because they wouldn't be able to own it). So pre-AI, customers had a problem, we paid the intern, but could not solve the problem. Post-AI, the same problem exist, we pay the same intern. The customer problem is solved.
- jt2190 1mo ago
  > . How do you think that lowers the value of an intern The article shows that the market value of the intern is lower: Work was not prioritized and given to a higher-cost junior engineer. > … pre-AI that feature would not have been given to an intern (because they wouldn't be able to own it)… Meaning, a more-skilled, higher-cost employee would have to do some or all of the work. Edit: Another meaning of “worth” is a “intrinsic value”. Humans have worth in this sense.

HEmanZ 1mo ago

Every single time I see an article like this come out on hacker news I have the same reaction “sure, this year”. There is still room for juniors… in fall of 2026. Will there be in fall of 2030? If your thesis rests on LLMs and AI systems not dramatically improving over where they are today, is it worth anything?

AnimalMuppet 1mo ago
I'll take the other side of that. Was there room for juniors in 2020? In 1950? What was the value of a junior in a world where programming was done in assembly? How much reliable work - how much value - could you get from them? Probably less than their salary. Now, you could argue that those were days when people moved jobs a lot less, so a junior was an investment for the company, even if they weren't worth their salary yet. And that's true to at least some degree. Still, that means that what changed isn't the value of juniors, but companies' willingness to invest in the future.
- HEmanZ 1mo ago
  In 2020 they could code to decent feature specs and handle simple features end to end. They could maintain the dashboard as features shipped and fix specific valuable but straightforward bugs. At least, the ones hired at any company I’ve worked for. This same work that ai agents already do better. Now only the top juniors are really still worth it, the ones with more nebulous ownership, communication, synthesis, drive skills. And even these I think are on their way to being consumed by ai, unless the curve flattens (totally possible too). I think my only point is that the world is moving so fast that so many “optimistic about the field” posts I see basically assume we’ve reached the end of ai agent and system capabilities. If we have then great. But I find it a really unlikely bet.
Merad 1mo ago
The real value of a junior engineer is that they will become a senior. That's really always been the case IME. Juniors in the first year or two of their career are routinely a net negative, maybe break even. But the thing is, unless you're making the bet that LLMs are going to _entirely_ replace human SWE, we as an industry have to maintain a pipeline to take in juniors and level them up. If we don't, we're going to be in real trouble in about 10 years.

randusername 1mo ago

I think reducing junior value to something like time to first merge is playing with fire. Semblance of value is not value, and the value increase here, if there is any, is from the AI. I trust junior + claude significantly less than I trusted pre-AI juniors. I do not think it will age well to put so much pressure on juniors to make contributions early and with mostly automated mentorship before they really understand what they are doing and why.

VCFundedGenYer 1mo ago

It's setting them up for absolute failure. They use it like a crutch and are unable to think critically or do tasks manually. I wouldn't want to hire anyone to my team with that deficiency. This article is wrong.

_the_inflator 1mo ago

"They don’t know what skills they lack. They don’t even know what skills are required because they haven’t put the effort in." This is it. Evolving into a developer role was more or less directly proportional to the effort you put in. Before AI I used to ask applicants to the department I oversaw whether they have a GitHub Account with a project to show, and bonus, which they are immensely proud of, no matter what. You had to grind and hustle, no shortcuts, and no amount of stackoverflow.com copy and paste could save you. And that leads me to two problems for the disguise of one: effort. This not only means reading and redoing simple exercises to complex projects, but committing to it instead of doom scrolling or TikTok frenzy. I reserved weekends for certain technical books and was frustrated, that there was so few time and so much book left. AI gave instant gratification a new dimension. It is horrible until AI gets as good as a perfect project from a prompt or we need to abandon it. Poor young guys, the joy of tuning out is over either by design or habit. And make no mistake. I don't blame them. We are all victims and perpetrators at the same time but on a different level.

machiaweliczny 1mo ago
> It is horrible until AI gets as good as a perfect project from a prompt or we need to abandon it. Getting close to it with my recent test of cursor cloud workflow. I've spent 300M tokens in a day and it achieved what I wanted. Manually would take me a month instead of day so it's not 2x it's 20x faster but project was quite simple rewrite of 20k lines of C++ and there was reference implementation. It also improved on original implementation perf wise. The problem is with fuzzy ideas for new development and with catching up with comprehension when working on something new - I guess we need better visualization tools for code. Product manager work seems like bottleneck currently and monitoring because coding can move quite fast.

adam_arthur 1mo ago

I see the complete opposite becoming the case. In a world where code can be generated rapidly, it's super critical that you have a core few set of people who really understand the macro design of the codebase and can continue to factor it well and iterate quickly. Adding more people and contributors just increases the probability that nobody really understands the structure of the codebase, it degrades into DRY and unfactored slop. The cost of reviewing other people's code is almost too high to be worthwhile now... It's much easier to just cut them out and do it yourself. A core set of very skilled people can just implement whatever change you are doing, but better, cleaner and faster. I built a fairly large and complex project with Codex and had to spend about 50% of the time factoring things down as I went into well contained modules, had a full understanding of the architecture at a high level. It would have been pretty difficult to do this if bringing in other contributors. Too many people comment about AI from the perspective of throwing feature A or B over the wall at the workplace, but anybody who has built a huge project from scratch will see how important good design is in regard to iteration speed and result quality. That being said, there are still areas where changes should be sized reasonably and human reviewed e.g. foundational or very mature software

jjk166 1mo ago
That makes sense from an engineering perspective, but from a business perspective you don't want the understanding to live in the heads of a small team of people. Companies own the codebase, they don't own their employees. If losing a single employee means losing the understanding for a significant chunk of the codebase, that's a serious risk. With the senior/junior model where you have a senior engineer architecting the system and a small team implementing that architecture, the understanding lives in the senior engineer's head, but it also lives in the head of the person who implemented it, and their teammates who implemented the parts that interact with it and were present for the discussions probably have enough knowledge to figure it out pretty quickly, so as long as the company doesn't lose the whole team all at once they're okay. If you make the team more productive with AI tools you can have the team do more, which still cuts down the total headcount, if to a lesser degree, but preserves the redundant understanding.

firmretention 1mo ago

I'm tired of being told what things aren't or what they don't do.

mrhottakes 1mo ago

So surely there's more demand to hire junior engineers and their salaries have gone up?

pragmatic 1mo ago

And then the senior engineer burns the f#ck out. Reviewing 100 lines of Junior dev slop was bad enough. Now 1000 lines of misguided jr dev ai slop? Ugh.

noworld 1mo ago
Just have claude review it.

pjmlp 1mo ago

Not sure about that, I have seen hiring frozen, as smaller teams can deliver more, and most of the tasks one could give juniors like cleaning up code, documentation, unit tests, and co, are now basically automated.