I can tell you where I am seeing it change things for sure, at the early stages. If you wanted to work at a startup I advise or invest in, based on what I'm seeing, it might be more difficult than it was 5 years because there is a slightly different calculus at the early stage. often your go to market and discovery processes seed/pre-seed are either: not working well yet, nonexistent, or decoupled from prod and eng, the goal obviously is over time to bring it all together into a complete system (a business) - as long as I've been around early stage startup there has always been a tension between engineering and growth on budget division, and the dance of how you place resources across them such that they come together well is quite difficult. Now what I'm seeing is: engineering could do with being a bit faster, but too much faster and they're going to be sitting around waiting for the business teams to get their shit together, where as before they would look at hiring a junior, now they will just hire some AI tools, or invest more time in AI scaffolding etc... allowing them to go a little bit faster, but it's understood: not as fast as hiring a jr engineer. I noticed this trend starting in the spring this year, and i've been watching to see if the teams who did this then "graduate" out of it to hiring a jr, so far only one team has hired and it seems they skipped jr and went straight to a more sr dev.

Around 80% of my work is easy while the remaining 20% is very hard. At this stage the hard stuff is far outside the capability of LLM but the easy stuff is very much within its capabilities. I used to hire contractors to help with that 80% work but now I use LLMs instead. It’s far cheaper, better quality, and zero hassle. That’s 3 junior / mid level jobs that are gone now. Since the hard stuff is combinatorial complexity I think by the time LLM is good enough to do that then it’s probably good enough to do just about everything and we’ll be living in an entirely different world.

Today's high-end LLMs can do a lot of unsupervised work. Debug iterations are at least junior level. Audio and visual output verification is still very week (i.e. to verify web page layout and component reactivity). Once the visual model is good enough to look at the screen pixels and understand, it will instantly replace junior devs. Currently if you have only text output all new LLMs can iterate flawlessly and solve problems on it. New backend dev from scratch is completely doable with vibe coding now, with some exceptions around race conditions and legacy code comprehension.

> This is just not happening anywhere around me.

Don't worry about where AI is today, worry about where it will be in 5-10 years. AI is brand new bleeding edge technology right now, and adaption always takes time, especially when the integration with IDEs and such is even more bleeding edge than the underlying AI systems themselves.

And speaking about the future, I wouldn't just worry about it replacing the programmer, I'd worry about it replacing the program. The future we are heading into might be one where the AI is your OS. If you need an app to do something, you can just make it up on the spot, a lot of classic programs will no longer need to exist.

Completely agree. I use LLM like I use stackoverflow, except this time i get straight to the answer and no one closes my question and marks it as a duplicate, or stupid.

I dont want it integrated into my IDE, i'd rather just give it the information it needs to get me my result. But yeah, just another google or stackoverflow.

Well your anecdote is clearly at odds with absolutely all of the macro economic data.

It's me. I'm the LM having work assigned to me that junior dev used to get. I'm actually just a highly proficient BA who has always almost read code, followed and understood news about software development here and on /. before, but generally avoided writing code out of sheer laziness. It's always been more convenient to find something easier and more lucrative in those moments if decision where I actually considered shifting to coding as my profession.

But here I am now. After filling in for lazy architects above me for 20 years while guiding developers to follow standards and build good habits and learning important lessons from talking to senior devs along the wa, guess what, I can magically do it myself now. The LM is the junior developer that I used to painstakingly explain the design to, and it screws it up half as much as the braindead and uncaring jr Dev used to. Maybe I'm not a typical case, but it shows a hint of where things might be going. This will only get easier as the tools become more capable and mature into something more reliable.

You're mostly right but very few teams are hiring in the grand scheme of things. The job market is not friendly for devs right now (not saying that's related to AI, just a bad market right now)

>> e.g. coming back to you and asking for help

Funny you mention this because Opus 4.5 did this just yesterday. I accidentally gave it a task with conflicting goals, and after working through it for a few minutes it realized what was going on, summarized the conflict and asked me which goal should be prioritized, along with detailed pros and cons of each approach. It’s exactly how I would expect a mid level developer to operate, except much faster and more thorough.

Doesn't matter. First, yes, a modern AI will come back and ask questions. Second, the AI is so much faster at interactions than a human is, that you can use that saved time to glance at its work and redirect it. The AI will come back with 10 prototype attempts in an hour, while a human will take a week for each, with more interupt questions for you about easy things

I had hired 3 junior/mid lvl devs and paid them to do nothing but study to improve their skills, it was my investment in their future, I had a big project on the horizon that I needed help with. After 6 months I let them go, the improvement was far too slow. Books that should have taken a week to get through were taking 6 weeks. Since then LLM have completely surpassed them. I think it’s reasonable to think that some day, maybe soon, LLMs will surpass me. Like everyone else, I have to the best I can while I can.

Maybe see it less as a junior and replacement for humans. See it more as a tool for you! A tool so you can do stuff you used to delegate/dump to a junior, do now yourself.

Claude gets better as Claude's managers explain concepts to it. It doesn't learn the way a human does. AI is not human. The benefit is that when Claude learns something, it doesn't need to run a MOOC to teach the same things to millions of individuals. Every copy of Claude instantly knows.

Yes, but the barrier to become a senior is what’s currently in dispute