1. replacing junior engineers, with AI ofcourse breaks the talent pipeline. Seniors will retire one day, who is going to replace them? Are we taking the bet, that we wont need any engineer at that time? sounds dangerous.

2. Junior engineer's heavy reliance on AI tools is a problem in itself. AI tools learn from existing code that is written by senior engineers. Too much use of AI by junior engineers will result in deterioration of engineering skills. It will eventually result in AI learning from AI generated code. This is true for most other content as well, as more and more content on internet is AI generated.

We frequently get juniors or interns who are perfectly capable of pumping out many LoC with the use of AI in various forms - the issue is that they _don't_ actually ever learn how to think for themselves, and can't fix problems when something goes wrong or the LLM paints itself into a corner. I have found myself doing a lot more shepherding and pairing with juniors when they can't figure something out recently, because they just have not had the space to build their own skills.

The main problem Garman overlooks is skill degradation. AI is excellent at helping a junior quickly draft boilerplate or find the right API, but it doesn't teach the essentials: debugging, systems thinking, and reading complex code. A junior who grows up on AI "crutches" risks never learning to solve the complex, ambiguous problems that distinguish a senior engineer.

Full disclosure: I am pretty sour on the current Amazon/AWS leadership as I think, well, they couldn't lead a company out of a paper bag (former manager at AWS). Is there data that Amazon/AWS is still hiring junior devs? I've heard it's very hard to get into student programs these days but I don't have the data. My grumpy position would be Garmin saying one thing and doing another.

> In fact, 30% of companies that laid off workers expecting savings ended up increasing expenses, and many had to rehire later.

Such as (cough...) Amazon?

Do we really think that we're going to see all developers morph into one archetype where we all have exactly the same effective skills? Many engineers already have an area of interest where they focus, be that performance optimisation or high level architecture.

It's my prediction that we're going to see more specialised skill sets become more commonplace. We'll have developers who can effectively use AI to bootstrap PoC's, developers who use AI in well established code bases to increase velocity (think asking Cursor to implement another set of REST endpoints for a new type), and developers who might choose to exclude AI from their workflows.

Eventually (I hope, at least) it'll be expected that it's another tool that developers can use in their day to day and less of the Omnissiah that has come to replace us as developers.

I have heard this thing quite a few times over last few months each time is Amazon or AWS CEOs. May be this time he want to replace senior engineers. That would be more useful for them as each passing year they more and more of them and in times like these they are not looking to go leave Amazon on their own.

I believe the idea is to not stop hiring juniors. Instead it's to replace anybody that commands a high salary with a team of cheaper juniors armed with LLM's. The idea is more about dragging down average pay than never hiring anybody. At least for now.

Will these intro AI systems then mature to be senior devs who can then mentor more junior AIs? Then we won't need any devs? Isn't that the end goal, AI runs the company and we can all go fishing?

Which is a less dumb idea: replacing new grad junior devs with AI or H1Bs?