There's a lot of ways to ship things & iterate without having any idea what you are building or doing technically, without building any tastes for how things work.

Those people are going to be the absolute most dangerous possible thing you can do to a company.

Maybe some day we can just totally give up the technicals to the machine, but I strongly doubt it. Every single model is both brilliant, but also a fool, no matter how frontier it is.

Yes, the feedback loops are faster. But you need to assess what's actually technically happening. Someone does. Maybe you offload the actual thinking up the chain, delegate taste understanding and judgement to only people up the chain, and make them all go mad dealing with endless slopcoding they are being hit with. But just as bad, that junior engineer is robbing themself too. Maybe they get away with not looking, but they sure aren't going to learn a lot.

I'm missing the link but there was a great submission maybe a month ago about two hypothetical grad students, I think in astronomy, where one failed and flailed and did things largely the old fashioned way, and the other used AI to get it done. The advisor couldn't really tell who was doing what. But at the end, one student had learned & gained wisdom, and the other had served as a glorified relay between the AI and the advisor and learned little. Same work output, but different human outcomes.

Junior engineers are really not that cheap. Relative to your capabilities you are not a bargain. You take a ton of valuable time from other people. If a company is hiring you, they either are truly fools lacking basic understanding, or they are in on the bargain that they want you to be getting better, are testing to see if you can become more useful. Sure it's great to show up and have impressive output, but you need to actually be learning and growing. You need to be participating in the feedback loop actively. Or you will be lapped by people who care & think like engineers.

> Those people are going to be the absolute most dangerous possible thing you can do to a company.

I hear you, but here's the thing: the companies don't give a shit about software quality any farther than it takes to keep you coming back as a customer. And it's actually been like this for a long time. They're going to hire people who can ship who-cares-how-buggy software as fast as possible. It's better for the bottom line.

And that pains my soul and pains me as a consumer (because we already had to put up with too much crap software before genAI started producing it in reams), but there's very limited money in the kind of quality you're talking about.

I hear stories from people interviewing now--the interviewers react negatively if you tell them you're working on keeping your programming skills fresh. They just want to know how many agents you can run at a time and how many lines of code you can generate per day.

Personally, I think someone skilled in software development working with genAI is going to be more productive than someone not skilled working with genAI, but I don't think that's even being selected for now.

Grim days.

The one thing that gives me hope is that every time we ask our graduates who are now in the field (and all work with AI) if we should drop classic CS education and only do AI, they all emphatically reply in the negative. Yes, we need some AI education in there, but they want the foundation, too.