Are junior devs cooked? This mini tool made in 20 min of prompting ReplitAI | Hacker News Reader

Are junior devs cooked? This mini tool made in 20 min of prompting ReplitAI

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5 pointsjohnrushx12 comments

Are carpenters cooked? I went to home depot, bought a hammer, nails, and some wood, and built a mini shelf.

Building trivial tools with AI doesn't mean that devs won't have jobs. It might mean that people won't be able to make a living whipping out brochure-ware web sites for their friends, but that market was just about dead anyway. And maybe it will even be able to handle basic CRUD apps. That doesn't mean the industry is dead, it just means the bar for low-hanging fruit is now hanging a little higher.

I didn't mean all-dev, but "junior" devs.

I was planning to build 100 mini tools for SEO. The goal was to hire a dev team. I approached an oursroucing agency and they told one tool will cost 1k-4k. So the budget is between $100k-$400k.

I decided to try to do it with AI developers. Tried bolt.new, v0 and then replit. Replit did the work the best. It took me less than half an hour to make the tool I wanted. Now I wanna spend the next 10 days making all these tools myself.

Anyone doing the same?

Creating mini tools is pretty effortless with any AI code gen tool. Maintaining them, adding additional features, scaling, etc. are things that require humans.

I believe every Jr dev should be learning how to use code gen tools as they are likely here to stay, but not overly rely on them, and use them like any other tool.

Companies that are happy with this, er, Automated Search Copy-Paste as a Service will deserve what happens to 'em.

What happens if you get rid of all the tasks for junior devs?

How do you get medium/senior devs in the future?

That pipeline is needed.

Too late, we already kicked the ladder out and the hit isn't going to be felt until the people responsible have moved on.

I worry there's an executive zeitgeist of: "Let someone else train them up, then we'll hire them away afterwards."

Yeah it’s already been going on. All the “you need 5 years of experience for entry level work” stuff you see.

Encouraging AI to replace people is just going to make it worse, on top of all the other possible issues.

I'm struck by a quixotic idea where future-companies return to a "X years service for a gold watch and a pension" approach. I don't actually think it would happen though.

A not-too-dreary idea: Perhaps the the beginning of the career-arc will change in terms of how quickly developers need to focus on code-reviews and diagnostics (of LLM output) at the expense of "read the docs and follow a guide." Of course that depends on a cultural understanding that LLM output must be checked, and that may take some major industry to become accepted by non-developer bosses, if ever.

My concern is that’s not a good way of learning, that it will produce lower quality devs than the traditional model. Or at least takes longer to get to the same point.

I’ve already seen higher level devs ask AIs questions and just copy/paste the answer without checking it as if that’s useful or trustworthy. How is a junior supposed to learn?

yeah that's my key concern.

or it might also be the opposite and junior devs may be using AI and learn faster.

In my own biz, I stopped hiring junior devs because it's faster for me to use AI for coding than to explain what I need and then validate the implementation with code-review...

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