I like the saying that LLMs are “good” at stuff you don’t know. That’s about it.

When you know the subject it stops being much useful because you’ll already know the very obvious stuff that LLM could help you.

This line of thought is short sighted. Your senior engineers will eventually retire or leave the company. If everyone replaces junior engineers with ai, then there will be nobody with the experience to fill those empty seats. Then you end up with no junior engineers and no senior engineers, so who is wrangling the ai?

It is based on my experience, which I trust immeasurably more than rigged "studies" done by the big LLM companies with clear conflict of interest.

This isn’t black and white. There will always be some junior hires. No one is saying replace ALL of them. But hiring 1 junior engineer instead of 3? Maybe…and that’s already happening to some degree.

Okay, but like-

You could just be lying.

You could even be a chatbot, programmed to hype AI in comments sections.

So I'm going to trust studies, not some anonymous commenter on the internet who says "trust me bro!"

And when the current senior programmers retire the field of juniors that are coming to replace them will be much smaller.

You're not wrong, and I feel like it was a developing problem even before AI - everybody wanted someone with experience, even if the technology was brand new.

True. It was a long-standing problem that entry-level jobs were mostly found in dodgy startups.

Tbh, I think the biggest issue right now isn't even AI, but the economy. In the 2010s we had pretty much no intrest rate at all while having a pretty decent economy, at least for IT. The 2008 financial crisis hardly mattered for IT, and Covid was a massive boost for IT. There was nothing else to really spend money on.

IT always has more projects than manpower, so with enough money to spend, they just hired everyone.

But the sanctions against Russia in response to their invasion of Ukraine really hit the economy and rising intrest rates to combat inflation meant that suddenly nobody wanted to invest anymore.

With no investments, startups dried up and large corporations also want to downsize. It's no coincidence that return-to-work mandates only started after the invasion and not in the two years prior of that where lockdowns were already revoked. Work from home worked totally fine for two years after covid lockdowns, and companies even praised how well it worked.

Same with AI. While it can improve productivity in some edge cases, I think it's mostly a scapegoat to make mass-fireings sound like a great thing to investors.

That said, even if you and I will be fine, it's still bad for the industry. And even if we weren't the ones pulling up the ladder behind us, I'd still like to find a way to start throwing ropes back down for the newbies...

You are totally right with that, and any chance I get I will continue to push for hiring juniors.

But I am also over corporate tears. For decades they have been crying over a lack of skilled workers in the IT and pushing for more and more people to join IT, so that they can dump wages, and as soon as the economy is bad, they instantly u-turn and dump employees.

If corporations want to be short-sighted and make people suffer for it, they won't get compassion from me when it fails.

Edit: Remember, we are not the ones pulling the ladder up.

Was it really Russia’s invasion, or just because the interest rates went up to prevent too much inflation after the COVID stimulus packages? Hard to imagine Russia had that much demand for software compared to the rest of the world.

Experienced software developer, here. "AI" is useful to me in some contexts. Specifically when I want to scaffold out a completely new application (so I'm not worried about clobbering existing code) and I don't want to do it by hand, it saves me time.

And... that's about it. It sucks at code review, and will break shit in your repo if you let it.

My fear for the software industry is that we'll end up replacing junior devs with AI assistance, and then in a decade or two, we'll see a lack of mid-level and senior devs, because they never had a chance to enter the industry.

Explain this too me AI. Reads back exactly what's on the screen including comments somehow with more words but less information
Ok....

Ok, this is tricky. AI, can you do this refactoring so I don't have to keep track of everything. No... Thats all wrong... Yeah I know it's complicated, that's why I wanted it refactored. No you can't do that... fuck now I can either toss all your changes and do it myself or spend the next 3 hours rewriting it.

Yeah I struggle to find how anyone finds this garbage useful.

Explain this too me AI. Reads back exactly what's on the screen including comments somehow with more words but less information
Ok....

Ok, this is tricky. AI, can you do this refactoring so I don't have to keep track of everything. No... Thats all wrong... Yeah I know it's complicated, that's why I wanted it refactored. No you can't do that... fuck now I can either toss all your changes and do it myself or spend the next 3 hours rewriting it.

Yeah I struggle to find how anyone finds this garbage useful.

Experienced software developer, here. "AI" is useful to me in some contexts. Specifically when I want to scaffold out a completely new application (so I'm not worried about clobbering existing code) and I don't want to do it by hand, it saves me time.

And... that's about it. It sucks at code review, and will break shit in your repo if you let it.

Like I said, I do find it useful at times. But not only shouldn't it replace coders, it fundamentally can't. At least, not without a fundamental rearchitecturing of how they work.

The reason it goes down a "really bad path" is that it's basically glorified autocomplete. It doesn't know anything.

On top of that, spoken and written language are very imprecise, and there's no way for an LLM to derive what you really wanted from context clues such as your tone of voice.

Take the phrase "fruit flies like a banana." Am I saying that a piece of fruit might fly in a manner akin to how another piece of fruit, a banana, flies if thrown? Or am I saying that the insect called the fruit fly might like to consume a banana?

It's a humorous line, but my point is serious: We unintentionally speak in ambiguous ways like that all the time. And while we've got brains that can interpret unspoken signals to parse intended meaning from a word or phrase, LLMs don't.

I like the saying that LLMs are “good” at stuff you don’t know. That’s about it.

When you know the subject it stops being much useful because you’ll already know the very obvious stuff that LLM could help you.

AI tools are way less useful than a junior engineer, and they aren't an investment that turns into a senior engineer either.