I’ve used cursor quite a bit recently in large part because it’s an organization wide push at my employer, so I’ve taken the opportunity to experiment.

My best analogy is that it’s like micro managing a hyper productive junior developer that somehow already “knows” how to do stuff in most languages and frameworks, but also completely lacks common sense, a concept of good practices, or a big picture view of what’s being accomplished. Which means a ton of course correction. I even had it spit out code attempting to hardcode credentials.

I can accomplish some things “faster” with it, but mostly in comparison to my professional reality: I rarely have the contiguous chunks of time I’d need to dedicate to properly ingest and do something entirely new to me. I save a significant amount of the onboarding, but lose a bunch of time navigating to a reasonable solution. Critically that navigation is more “interrupt” tolerant, and I get a lot of interrupts.

That said, this year’s crop of interns at work seem to be thin wrappers on top of LLMs and I worry about the future of critical thinking for society at large.

Not a developer per se (mostly virtualization, architecture, and hardware) but AI can get me to 80-90% of a script in no time. The last 10% takes a while but that was going to take a while regardless. So the time savings on that first 90% is awesome. Although it does send me down a really bad path at times. Being experienced enough to know that is very helpful in that I just start over.

In my opinion AI shouldn’t replace coders but it can definitely enhance them if used properly. It’s a tool like everything. I can put a screw in with a hammer but I probably shouldn’t.

Yeah but a Claude/Cursor/whatever subscription costs $20/month and a junior engineer costs real money. Are the tools 400 times less useful than a junior engineer? I’m not so sure…

I have limited AI experience, but so far that's what it means to me as well: helpful in very limited circumstances.

Mostly, I find it useful for "speaking new languages" - if I try to use AI to "help" with the stuff I have been doing daily for the past 20 years? Yeah, it's just slowing me down.

By having it write a quick function to do so or to sort them alphabetically within the chat? Because I've used GPT to write boilerplate and/or basic functions for random tasks like this numerous times without issue. But expecting it to sort a block of text for you is not what LLMs are really built for.

That being said, I agree that expecting AI to write complex and/or long-form code is a fool's hope. It's good for basic tasks to save time and that's about it.

I agree, but the goal of CEOs is “line go up,” not make our eng team stronger (usually)

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

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.