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- Hacker News
- It's setting them up for absolute failure.
They use it like a crutch and are unable to think critically or do tasks manually.
I wouldn't want to hire anyone to my team with that deficiency.
This article is wrong.
- Not sure about that, I have seen hiring frozen, as smaller teams can deliver more, and most of the tasks one could give juniors like cleaning up code, documentation, unit tests, and co, are now basically automated.by pjmlp
- Every single time I see an article like this come out on hacker news I have the same reaction “sure, this year”.
There is still room for juniors… in fall of 2026. Will there be in fall of 2030? If your thesis rests on LLMs and AI systems not dramatically improving over where they are today, is it worth anything?
by HEmanZ - I'll take the other side of that. Was there room for juniors in 2020? In 1950? What was the value of a junior in a world where programming was done in assembly? How much reliable work - how much value - could you get from them? Probably less than their salary.
Now, you could argue that those were days when people moved jobs a lot less, so a junior was an investment for the company, even if they weren't worth their salary yet. And that's true to at least some degree. Still, that means that what changed isn't the value of juniors, but companies' willingness to invest in the future.
by AnimalMuppet - The real value of a junior engineer is that they will become a senior. That's really always been the case IME. Juniors in the first year or two of their career are routinely a net negative, maybe break even. But the thing is, unless you're making the bet that LLMs are going to _entirely_ replace human SWE, we as an industry have to maintain a pipeline to take in juniors and level them up. If we don't, we're going to be in real trouble in about 10 years.by Merad
- AI didn't X, it Y. Where Y is write this post.by ericdykstra
- "They don’t know what skills they lack. They don’t even know what skills are required because they haven’t put the effort in."
This is it.
Evolving into a developer role was more or less directly proportional to the effort you put in. Before AI I used to ask applicants to the department I oversaw whether they have a GitHub Account with a project to show, and bonus, which they are immensely proud of, no matter what.
You had to grind and hustle, no shortcuts, and no amount of stackoverflow.com copy and paste could save you.
And that leads me to two problems for the disguise of one: effort. This not only means reading and redoing simple exercises to complex projects, but committing to it instead of doom scrolling or TikTok frenzy.
I reserved weekends for certain technical books and was frustrated, that there was so few time and so much book left.
AI gave instant gratification a new dimension. It is horrible until AI gets as good as a perfect project from a prompt or we need to abandon it.
Poor young guys, the joy of tuning out is over either by design or habit.
And make no mistake. I don't blame them. We are all victims and perpetrators at the same time but on a different level.
- > It is horrible until AI gets as good as a perfect project from a prompt or we need to abandon it.
Getting close to it with my recent test of cursor cloud workflow.
I've spent 300M tokens in a day and it achieved what I wanted. Manually would take me a month instead of day so it's not 2x it's 20x faster but project was quite simple rewrite of 20k lines of C++ and there was reference implementation. It also improved on original implementation perf wise.
The problem is with fuzzy ideas for new development and with catching up with comprehension when working on something new - I guess we need better visualization tools for code. Product manager work seems like bottleneck currently and monitoring because coding can move quite fast.
- > This summer, we assigned the problem to an intern (that’s less tenure than a junior engineer). The intern led the development of this feature. They talked to the product manager to understand the problem and requirements. They wrote the design document on how to approach it, aligned with the team, and built it. Of course they did that with the help of AI, and the team they were working with.
So, interns can still produce some value. How much value?
> In our product, there was a feature which had been requested for years, but had not been built yet. It wasn’t overly complex, but it was not critical.
Said another way: The feature was of so little value that it was not even worth assigning to a non-AI-assisted intern! This is what most of us mean when we say “AI lowers the value of…”
by jt2190 - Thanks. How do you think that lowers the value of an intern, can you explain it?
You're right that pre-AI that feature would not have been given to an intern (because they wouldn't be able to own it). So pre-AI, customers had a problem, we paid the intern, but could not solve the problem. Post-AI, the same problem exist, we pay the same intern. The customer problem is solved.
by franciscomt - Sort of like how there's a running joke, "this meeting could have been an email"; I think that for all the substance I found in this "4 minutes to read" blog post, it could have been a one-sentence comment in some discussion thread somewhere instead.by samsari
- When AI learns to only use concise, meaningful words instead of words for the sake of vomiting out more tokens, I suspect we’ll have finally achieved proper AGI.by pennomi
- This is something I've been thinking about the last couple days: how to get junior engineers to be valuable.
I developed a system to help prepare for leet coding interviews so I never feel lost under pressure solving a problem again. It is like a debugger that steps through the code showing all the values of all the variables with data visualizations that reflect the logic so I can grok what it is doing. [0]
After I had the Claude build it, I started looking at the values and there were some mistakes. So, again, the coding agent ran all the code, recorded all the values, and made sure that they line up.
Here is the really cool thing about that. The coding agents can't be trusted. By observing the values stepping though, what I really was doing was debugging coding agent code. It is debugging code presented in a way that is extremely simplified.
What I've been thinking about yesterday and today is, can I do the same thing with a pull request? Have the coding agent run the code, capture all the values, and create a console for the reviewer to step through looking at with data visualizations that abstractly represent that code.
Two things. 1. Coding agents can't be trusted and 2. reviewing code is very difficult. But is it possible to use coding agents to make reviewing code easy for humans? I think so.
That would be a great way for junior engineers to be extremely useful. They only have to step through the code and make sure that all the values line up.
by dataviz1000 - I've dreamt about pernosco (rr) style traces being available for tests in PRs. Imagine a DST setup where the PR shows diffs of deterministic test execution traces (I have no idea what these diffs would look like)by 0x696C6961
- Is this just an ad for the product? How is this connected specifically to junior engineers? Is it implying that they cannot debug code without this kind of tool while more experienced people can?
- > If the assumption is that AI is going to radically simplify the technical portion of the role, then the people who have started their careers with AI will be in the best spot once they have acquired the experience.
This doesn't make sense - AI is to allow unskilled people to produce what was previously only produced by skilled people.
IOW, how does having 2 years of experience using an LLM to generate code beat having 2 months of experience?
The whole point of using the LLM is that very little skill is involved; how does starting earlier with it provide an advantage? If it's as good as it is claimed to be, starting later with it won't make a single iota of difference to the generated results, compared to someone who started earlier.
by lelanthran - The paradox of AI. The better it is the less benefit there is to being an early adopter.by andersmurphy
- I'd say I'm in a better position by mostly ignoring AI so far - I haven't wasted any time or effort working out the current week's fashion in AI prompting methods that will be out of date by next week.by MISO2
- I think it’s an oversimplification to say that using AI for se dev is a trivial skill. You can see it even now with some people chatting with Claude and others running multiple agents in a loop. There’s skill in that.by franciscomt
- I think it is less about junior/mid engineers, and more just about the kinds of work inexperienced/cheap developers are often doing: assembly line, JIRA-ticket-taker type development.
This is especially impacting Indian tech workers in the US [0] since these are often the types of roles that InfoSys and other foreign tech consulting firms are staffing. The new $100,000 fee to sponsor an H1B visa has made it difficult to justify hiring foreign tech workers when most of the time they are just going to be using American LLMs to do their work anyway.
[0] https://thefederal.com/category/news/h1b-visa-indian-tech-wo...
by petcat - Good riddance. Worked with many offshored firms before, from all over the world. The work was subpar before and it’s even worse now.
Now I can fire off agents ona remote box to do the grunt work and open PRs, then just prompt to review/iterate it. No timezone timezone delays or language barriers. Nearly instant feedback.
Coding is solved. Engineering is not. Catch up or be left behind.
- > The junior engineer executes it, which nowadays means prompting it to an AI tool, and creating a pull request (PR). The PR receives feedback from more senior engineers. The junior engineer gets the feedback and takes it to the AI tool again, proposing changes.
Yeah this part should not exist anymore. It doesn’t where I work.
When I get a PR I just ask an agent to make the proposed changes. There is absolutely zero incentive for me to give feedback for you to give to an agent when I can give it to an agent myself.
Coding isn’t the job anymore. It’s understanding systems and architecture design, and ownership of what you work on. Being able to design solutions, understand them, deliver them and support them in production is the job now. Engineering is still engineering. End to end ownership is the job.
- Ownership of what then?by conradfr
- I agree. Although I think that was never the job. Even without AI, the practice of subdividing work into coding tasks was not a good one.
AI just made it obvious.
by franciscomt - "End to end ownership is the job."
This is an incredibly good and concise articulation of where the role is going. Thank you.
by joshmarlow - Making changes to someone else’s PR (other than extremely trivial ones) feels like they don’t have much ownership. People often have a reason for doing things the way they did and skipping over them seems like a mistake.by literallyroy
- Is all of hackernews webdev only? I can’t imagine “coding not being a job anymore” in fields like automotive, medical, military, robotics, and HPCby glouwbug
- It largely depends on the person. We have several junior engineers who cannot solve a problem without AI. When AI can’t solve it, they just keep trying and failing. And I mean weeks to months late. Then rinse and repeat on the next task. It used to be that they would have been forced to seek help from a senior engineer. Combine the teaching with a real struggle is what makes them better.
As it is now, they aren’t being taught and they’re not learning from what the AI is producing because they don’t understand it. The produced code is a black box, and the AI’s development is a black box too. All they know is that running it produces something like what they asked for. They have no idea about failure modes which is a fundamental concept of engineering. The worst part is that AI is covering up their deficiencies. They don’t know what skills they lack. They don’t even know what skills are required because they haven’t put the effort in.
There are obviously good junior engineers that are using AI judiciously and not as a crutch. They’re the ones who still interact with seniors to get help and actually learn. They would have been successful without AI too. These are the ones the author is talking about. In my experience, the momentum is moving towards the worse type of junior the more AI is adopted. Unless that changes, it will erase their value.
by olsondv - I work at a workplace where the seniors use AI, and I am chastised for asking questions. I end up using the AI as a learning tool instead.by Varelion
- > “…they aren’t being taught and they’re not learning from what the AI is producing because they don’t understand it. […] the ones who still interact with seniors to get help and actually learn.”
You’re describing a gap between those who would otherwise fail in their jobs sooner, and those who already know what to do. Sounds like there is a new paradigm for management, too.
by xtiansimon