| ▲ | sho_hn 2 hours ago |
| > If you have never written and maintained a complex project by hand, you should not be allowed to be involved in the development of production bound code. So only the old hands allowed from now on, or how are we going to provide these learning opportunities at scale for new developers? Serious question. |
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| ▲ | hallway_monitor 2 hours ago | parent | next [-] |
| Junior developers have always been a lot less effective than senior developers. We will need new senior developers so we will need to train junior developers. Maybe we train them by forcing them to do things the hard way. The slow way. By hand. Because if we let them do things the fast way they are going to cause some serious damage. |
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| ▲ | SlinkyOnStairs an hour ago | parent [-] | | Who's going to be doing that? Employers were already refusing to hire juniors, even when 0.5-1 years' salary for a junior would be cheaper than spending the same on hiring a senior. They'll never accept intentionally "slower" development for the greater good. | | |
| ▲ | jacobsenscott 42 minutes ago | parent | next [-] | | > They'll never accept intentionally "slower" development for the greater good. That comes post Chernobyl. | |
| ▲ | 8note an hour ago | parent | prev [-] | | internships for one. my last summer intern did everything the manual way, except for a chunk where I wanted him to get something done fast without having to learn all the underlying chunks |
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| ▲ | lrvick 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| The same way I learned 25 years ago still works today. Volunteer on open source projects. Always happy to mentor people at stagex and hashbang (orgs I founded). Also being a maintainer of an influential open source project goes on a resume, and helps you get seen in a crowded market while boosting your skills and making the world better. Win/win all around. |
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| ▲ | rafaelmn 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-] |
| Even by pessimistic progress projections AI will be better than most at coding before this is a long term issue. And the output multiplier I'm seeing I suspect the number of SWEs needed to achieve the same task is going to start shrinking fast. I don't think SWE is a promising career to get started in today. |
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| ▲ | mwwaters an hour ago | parent | next [-] | | There’s certainly a lot of uncertainty. But pro-AI posts never seem to pin themselves down on whether code checked in will be read and understood by a human. Perhaps a lot of engineers work in “vibe-codeable” domains, but a huge amount of domains deal with money, health, financial reporting, etc. Then there are domains those domains use as infrastructure (OS, cloud, databases, networking, etc.) Even where it is non-critical, such as a social media site, whether that site runs and serves ads (and bills for them correctly) is critical for that company. | |
| ▲ | lrvick 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | But you have to be good at SWE to be good at security engineering and sysadmin, and the demand there is skyrocketing. We have a completely broken internet with almost nothing using memory encryption, deterministic builds, full source bootstrapping, secure enclaves, end to end encryption, remote attestation, hardware security auth, or proper code review. Decades of human cognitive work to be done here even with LLM help because the LLMs were trained to keep doing things the old way unless we direct them to do otherwise from our own base of experience on cutting edge security research no models are trained on sufficiently. | |
| ▲ | 8note an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | im not convinced that it will. you dont notice it when you are only looking at your own harness results, but the llm bakes so very much of your own skills and opinions into what it does. LLMs still regurgitate a ton. | |
| ▲ | jazz9k 26 minutes ago | parent | prev [-] | | Perhaps at some point, but tokens are expensive and the major providers are burning through cash. I suppose it's like bandwidth cost in the 90s. At some point, it becomes a commodity. |
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