Cool cool cool. So if you use LLMs as junior devs, let me ask you how future awesome senior devs like you will come around? From WHAT job experience? From what coding struggle?
I'm asking because I legitimately have not figured out an answer to this problem.
Seriously, long term thinking went out the window long time ago, didn't it?
It is definitely a problem for the company. How is it a problem for the senior dev at any point?
What incentive do they have to aid the company at the expense of their own *long term* career prospects?
Unfortunately the bar is being raised on us. If you can't hang with the new order you are out of a job. I promise I was one of the holdouts who resisted this the most. It's probably why I got laid off last spring.
Thankfully, as of this last summer, agentic dev started to really get good, and my opinion made a complete 180. I used the off time to knock out a personal project in a month or two's worth of time, that would have taken me a year+ the old way. I leveraged that experience to get me where I am now.
I don't think we'll be out of jobs. Maybe temporarily. But those jobs come back. The energy and money drain that LLMs are, are just not sustainable.
I mean, it's cool that you got the project knocked out in a month or two, but if you'd sit down now without an LLM and try to measure the quality of that codebase, would you be 100% content? Speed is not always a good metric. Sure, 1 -2 months for a project is nice, but isn't especially a personal project more about the fun of doing the project and learning something from it and sharpening your skills?
Also, I'm pretty sure junior devs can use directing a LLM to learn from mistakes faster. Let them play. Soon enough they're going to be better than all of us anyway. The same way widespread access to strong chess computers raised the bar at chess clubs.
I'm probably a pretty shitty developer by HN standards but I generally have to build a prototype to fully understand and explore problem and iterate designs and LLMs have been pretty good for me as trainers for learning things I'm not familiar with. I do have a certain skill set, but the non-domain stuff can be really slow and tedious work. I can recognize "good enough" and "clean" and I think the next generation can use that model very well to be become native with how to succeed with these tools.
Let me put it this way: people don't have to be hired by the best companies to gain experience using best practices anymore.