The level of cynicism here is astronomical. After discovering the strategy of "fire juniors and let a few seniors manage autonomous agents" was an abject failure, now the line is "actually juniors are great because we've brainwashed them into thinking AI is cool and we don't have to pay them so much". Which makes me want to vomit.

The only relevant point here is keeping a talent pipeline going, because well duh. That it even needs to be said like it's some sort of clever revelation is just another indication of the level of stupid our industry is grappling with.

The. Bubble. Cannot. Burst. Soon. Enough!!

Most of the apps that I use regularly fail at least once a day nowadays. I think this is a direct cause of putting AI code in production without reviewing/QA.

Much like saying you can replace an accountant with a calculator in 1970. Ai coding has its place, but it has a long way to go and if anything junior devs and AI coding agents do raise a whole topic of debate.

Is learning to code with AI coding agents going to make you a better programmer than one who learns to code without such tools?

Ive been managing and supporting teams for a long time and i'm sorry, but junior and mid-level devs do the majority of the heavy lifting when it comes to work output in big corps. I don't think AI will replace them. I don't think all these IC5 and IC6 engineers are going to be putting up 400-500 diffs a year anytime soon.

Thank God someone still has a functioning brain.

You should replace devs vertically, not horizontally, otherwise, who'll be you senior dev tomorrow?

Jokes aside, AI has the potential to reduce workforce across the board, but companies should strive to retain all levels staffed with humans. Also, an LLM can't fully replace even a junior, not yet at least.

Juniors are also more likely to be the MOST proficient/comfortable with AI tooling.

Pair them with a senior so they can learn engineering best practices:

And now you've also just given your senior engineers some extra experience/insights into how to more effectively leverage AI.

It accelerates the org to have juniors (really: a good mix of all experience levels)

I gave opus an "incorrect" research task (using this slash command[1]) in my REST server to research to use SQLite + Litestream VFS can be used to create read-replicas for REST service itself. This is obviously a dangerous use of VFS[2] and a system like sqlite in general(stale reads and isolation wise speaking). Ofc it happily went ahead and used Django's DB router feature to implement `allow_relation` to return true if `obj._state.db` was a `replica` or `default` master db.

Now claude had access to this[2] link and it got the daya in the research prompt using web-searcher. But that's not the point. Any Junior worth their salt — distributed systems 101 — would know _what_ was obvious, failure to pay attention to the _right_ thing. While there are ideas on prompt optimization out there [3][4], the issue is how many tokens can it burn to think about these things and come up with optimal prompt and corrections to it is a very hard problem to solve.

[1] https://github.com/humanlayer/humanlayer/blob/main/.claude/c... [2] https://litestream.io/guides/vfs/#when-to-use-the-vfs [3] https://docs.boundaryml.com/guide/baml-advanced/prompt-optim... [4]https://github.com/gepa-ai/gepa

Junior vs senior is the wrong framing. It's "can use LLMs effectively" vs "can't use LLMs effectively".

It's like expecting someone to know how to use source control (which at some point wasn't table stakes like it is today).

> AWS CEO says using AI to replace junior staff is 'Dumbest thing I've ever heard' (theregister.com) 1697 points by JustExAWS 3 months ago

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44972151

Does this story add anything new?

Team at a bank I know went from 13 members to 2. The remaining two are likely to be outsourced. They are trying to transition to the business side.

Folks in Hyderabad can run LLMs too and data centre and infrastructure costs are lower in India.