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Comment by misja111 | Hacker News Reader

> Senior developers: Fewer juniors means more grunt work landing on your plate

I'm not sure I agree with that. Right now as a senior my task involves reviewing code from juniors; replace juniors with AI and it means reviewing code from AI. More or less the same thing.

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> More or less the same thing.

Worse. The AI doesn't share any responsibility.

And can’t be mentored by the senior except in some ersatz flat text instruction files.

And the mistakes AI makes don't carry the same code smells juniors make. There are markers in human code that signals how well they understood the problem, AI code more often looks correct at a glance even if it's horribly problematic.

Yeah, this is a big thing. AIs (at the moment) don't learn. You wait for a new model to come out and hope it is better than the last one. But that isn't the same thing as a person learning over time.

> AIs (at the moment) don't learn.

Yes, and even when it learns (because there's new version of the AI model) it doesn't learn according to your company/team's values. Those values might be very specific to your business model.

Currently, AI (LLM) is just a tool. It's a novel and apparently powerful tool. But it's still just a tool.

The juniors get better and closer to the ideal that my team requires via this process. Current AIs don’t, not the same way.

And then because of salary compression and inversion where new employees at the same level as your former junior developers get paid more based on market trends while HR won’t give your former junior developers raises, they end up leaving when ther get “good enough”.

So why hire juniors at all instead of poaching a mid level ticket taker from another company?

If you are a line level manager, even if you want to retain your former junior now mid level developer, your hands are probably tied.

Humans resemble AGI more than they do LLMs

currently my job as a junior is to review vibe code that was "written" by seniors. it's just such bullshit and they make mistakes I wouldn't even dare to make in my first year of school

Except that the AI doesn't get tired, and your superiors know it. The volume of code you'll have to review will increase.

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