This was interesting.

I still wonder, if (as the author mentions and I've seen in my experience) companies are pivoting to hiring more senior devs and fewer or no junior devs...

... where will the new generations of senior devs come from? If, as the author argues, the role of the knowledgeable senior is still needed to guide the AI and review the occasional subtle errors it produces, where will new generations of seniors be trained? Surely one cannot go from junior-to-senior (in the sense described in TFA) just by talking to the AI? Where will the intuition that something is off come from?

Another thing that worries me, but I'm willing to believe it'll get better: the reckless abandon with which AI solutions consume resources and are completely obvious to it, like TFA describes (3.5 GB of RAM for the easiest, 3 pillar Hanoi configuration). Every veteran computer user (not just programmers but also gamers) has been decrying for ages how software becomes more and more bloated, how hardware doesn't scale with the (mis)use of resources, etc. And I worry this kind of vibe coding will only make it horribly worse. I'm hoping some sense of resource consciousness can be included in new training datasets...

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4 days ago | parent | next [-]

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furyofantares 4 days ago | parent | prev [-]

People keep saying this, but the young folks who start out with stuff are gonna surpass us old folks at some point. Us old folks just get a big head start.

Right now we're comparing seniors who learned the old way to juniors who learned the old way. Soon we'll start having juniors who started out with this stuff.

It also takes time to learn how to teach people to use tools. We're all still figuring out how to use these, and I think again, more experience is a big help here. But at some point we'll start having people who not only start out with this stuff, but they get to learn from people who've figured out how to use it already.

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the_af 4 days ago | parent [-]

> Soon we'll start having juniors who started out with this stuff.

But who will hire them? Businesses are ramping down from hiring juniors, since apparently a few good seniors with AI can replace them (in the minds of the people doing the hiring).

Or is it that when all of the previous batch of seniors have retired or died of old age, businesses will have no option but to hire juniors trained "the new way", without a solid background to help them understand when AI solutions are flawed or misguided, and pray it all works out?

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furyofantares 4 days ago | parent [-]

> But who will hire them?

Anyone who wants a competitive advantage?

My claim is that the gap between junior and senior has temporarily widened, which is why someone who previously would want to hire juniors might not right now. But I expect it will narrow as a generation that learned on this stuff comes into the fold, probably to a smaller gap than existed pre-LLM.

I think it will also narrow if the tools continue to get better.

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the_af 3 days ago | parent [-]

> Anyone who wants a competitive advantage?

Do you mean long-term vision? Short-term the advantage is in hiring only seniors, but do you mean companies will foresee trouble looming ahead and "waste" money on juniors just to avert this disaster?

My own feeling is that this could become like a sort of... well, I recently heard of the term "population time bomb", and it was eye-opening for me. How once it starts rolling, it's incredibly hard/impossible to revert, etc.

So what if we have some sort of "experience time bomb" here? Businesses stop hiring juniors. Seniors are needed to make AI work, but their experience isn't passed on because... who to pass it to? And then juniors won't have this wealth of "on the job experience" to be able to smell AI disaster and course-correct. The kind of experience you learn from actual work, not books.

	▲	furyofantares a day ago \| parent [-]
		No, I think new developers who are "native" to this world will be a whole different breed. Maybe still not as good as seniors (as has always been the case) but closer than ever. I could certainly see a wave of oversupply of juniors followed by a wave of undersupply. Say we stop hiring many juniors - a lot of people trying to get into industry right now are in for a rude time. Then maybe fewer people trying to learn it over the next few years, but those who do end up quite valuable.