Future-Proofing Junior Devs in the LLM Era

As someone who makes a living with programming and has a CS degree and have a 14 year old starting college for CS next semester, I just want to say: your juniors shouldn’t be discouraged in the field of software engineering.

LLM Tools don’t eliminate developer jobs, they shift where the value is. There’s now more opportunity for devs to focus on the things LLMs can’t do well yet: writing good tests, hardening security, building robust systems, and understanding edge cases.

It’s kind of like what happened when cars replaced horses. The transportation industry didn’t vanish, it evolved. The buggy makers and blacksmiths just had to adapt to a new kind of vehicle and maintenance strategies. Same goes here. LLMs won’t replace CS skills, they’ll just nudge us to aim them in a new direction.

Encourage your kids and juniors to learn these tools and figure out how to leverage them. That’s where the next wave of dev work is heading in my humble opinion and that’s okay.