Who knows if we'll even need senior devs in 5 years. We'll see what happens. I think the role of software development will change so much those years of technical experience as a senior won't be so relevant but that's just my 5 cents.
While the work seems to take similar amounts of time, I spend drastically less time fixing bugs, bugs that take me days or God forbid weeks, solved in minutes usually, sometimes maybe an hour if its obscure enough. You just have to feed the model enough context, full stack trace, every time.
Man, I wish this was true. I've given the same feedback on a colleague's clearly LLM-generated PRs. Initially I put effort into explaining why I was flagging the issues, now I just tag them with a sadface and my colleague replies "oh, cursor forgot." Clearly he isn't reading the PRs before they make it to me; so long as it's past lint and our test suite he just sends the PR.
I'd worry less if the LLMs weren't prone to modifying the preconditions of the test whenever they fail such that the tests get neutered, rather than correctly resolving the logic issues.
The bad product managers have become 10x worse because they just generate AI garbage to spray at the engineering team. We are now writing AI review process for our user stories to counter the AI generation of the product team. I'd much rather spend my time building things than having AI wars between teams.
which means either devs will take over architectural roles (which already exist and are filled) or architects will take over dev roles. same goes for testing/QA - these are already positions within the industry in addition to being hats that we sometimes put on out of necessity or personal interest.
This is mostly a good thing provided you have a clear separation between solution exploration and actually shipping software - as the extra work put into productionizing a solution may not be obvious or familiar to someone who can use AI to identify a bugfix candidate, but might not know how we go about doing pre-release verification.
Which stands to reason you'll need less of them. I'm really hoping this somehow leads to an explosion of new companies being built and hiring workers , otherwise - not good for us.
Depends on how much demand there would be for somewhat-cheaper software. Human hours taken could well remain the same.
Also depends on whether this approach leads to a whole lot of badly-fucked projects that companies can’t do without and have to hire human teams to fix…
I've found Opus 4.5 as a big upgrade compared to any of the other models. Big step up and the minor issues that were annoying and I needed to watch out for with Sonnet and GPT5.1.
It's to the point where I'm on the side of, if the models are offline or I run out of tokens for the 5 hour window or the week (with what I'm paying now), there's kind of no use of doing work. I can use other models to do planning or some review, but then wait until I'm back with Opus 4.5 to do the code.
It still absolutely requires review from me and planning before writing the code, and this is why there can be some slop that goes by, but it's the same as if you have a junior and they put in weak PRs. Difference is much quicker planning which the models help with, better implementation with basic conventions compared to juniors, and much easier to tell a model to make changes compared to a human.
I guess it depends on the project type, in some cases like you're saying way faster. I definitely recognize I've shaved weeks off a project, and I get really nuanced and Claude just updates and adjusts.