It’s impressive someone early in their career shipped this. There seems to be a stark increase in high-quality AI/data projects from early-career engineers lately and I'm super curious what’s driving that (and honestly speaking: a little jealous).
Compare that to a smart engineer who doesn't have that wisdom: those people might have an easier time jumping in to difficult problems without the mental burden of knowing all of the problems upfront.
The most meaningful technical advances I've personally seen always started out as "let's just do it, it will only take a weekend" and then 2 years later, you find yourself with a finished product. (If you knew it would take 2 years from the start, you might have never bothered)
Naivety isn't always a bad thing.
My favorite story in CS related to this is how Huffman Coding came to be [1]
Now that as a junior, I can spin up a team of AIs and delegate, I can tackle a bunch of senior level tasks if I'm good at coordination.
Due to AI this is now my job. My company is hiring less juniors, but the ones we do hire are given more scope and coordination responsibilities since otherwise we'd just be LLM wrappers.
> The difference between junior and senior is knowing where and when to do what at an increasing scale as you gain experience.
Many juniors believe they know what to do. And want to immediately take on yuge projects.
e.g. I decided I want to rewrite my whole codebase in C++20 modules for compile time.
Prior to AI, I wouldn't be given help for this refactor so it wouldn't happen.
Now I just delegate to AI and convert my codebase to modules in just a few days!
At that point I discovered Clang 18 wasn't really optimized for modules and they actually increased build time. If I had more experience I could've predicted using half-baked C++ features is a bad idea.
That being said, every once in a while one of my stupid ideas actually pays off.
e.g. I made a parallel AI agent code review workflow a few months ago back when everyone was doing single agent reviews. The seniors thought it was a dumb idea to reinvent the wheel when we had AI code review already, but it only took a day or two to make the prototype.
Turns out reinventing the wheel was extremely effective for our team. It reduced mean time-to-merge by 20%!
This was because we had too many rules (several hundred, due to cooperative multitasking) for traditional AI code reviewers. Parallel agents prevented the rules from overwhelming the context.
But at the time, I just thought parallel agents were cool because I read the Gas Town blog and wasn't thinking about "do we have any unique circumstances that require us to build something internally?"
Hang on, what's impressive about this?
The people coming up now don't have that baggage. They never internalized "write the code yourself" as the default. They think in terms of spawning systems, letting things run, checking outcomes. It's way closer to managing a process than engineering in the traditional sense. And yeah, that shows up in what gets shipped. A 21-year-old will brute force 20 directions in parallel with agents and just pick what works. Someone more "experienced" will spend that same time trying to design the "right" approach up front. By the time they're done thinking, the other person has already iterated past them.
It's kind of unsettling is how basically all of these "senior instincts" are now liabilities. Caring about perfect structure, being allergic to randomness, needing to understand every layer before moving forward, etc. used to be strengths. Now they just slow you down.
You can already feel the split forming. Younger builders are comfortable letting systems do things they don't fully understand. Senior engineers keep trying to pull everything back into something legible and controlled, kneecapping themselves. That gap is not small.
What I'm seeing in my circle of founders and CEOs is that they're slowly laying off these older devs (cutoff age is around 24yrs) and replacing them with fresh, young talent, better suited for this new agentic era. From their reports the velocity gains are insane; and it compounds. Basically, these older folks are still doing polynomial thinking in an exponential landscape. They are dinosaurs slated for extinction.
This is also maybe one of the biggest pitfalls as our society get's "older" with more old people, and less "kids". We need kids to force us to do things differently.
For me (a non-early career dev) these projects terrify me. People build stuff that just seem like enormous liabilities relying on tools mostly controlled and gate kept by someone else. My intuition tells me something is off. I could be wrong about it all, but one thing I've learned over the years is that ignoring my intuition typically doesn't end well!