And the quality of code models puts out is, in general, well below the average output of a professional developer.
It is however much faster, which makes the gambling loop feel better. Buying and holding a stock for a few months doesn't feel the same as playing a slot machine.
https://simonwillison.net/2025/Feb/3/a-computer-can-never-be...
E.g. look at the "SWE-Bench Pro (public)" heading in this page: https://openai.com/index/introducing-gpt-5-4/ , showing reasoning efforts from none to high.
Of course, they don't learn like humans so you can't do the trick of hiring someone less senior but with great potential and then mentor them. Instead it's more of an up front price you have to pay. The top models at the highest settings obviously form a ceiling though.
Ignoring the useless/unqualified candidates and models, human applicants have a much wider range of talent for you to choose from than the top models + tooling.
The frontier models + tooling are, in the grand scheme of things, basically equivalent at any given moment.
Humans can be just as bad as the worst models, but models are no where near as good as the best humans.
My experience is the absolute opposite. I am much more in control of quality with Ai agents.
I am never letting junior to midlevels into my team again.
In fact, I am not sure I will allow any form of manual programming in a year or so.
Exactly. You control the quality of the people in your team. You can train, fire, hire, etc until you get the skill level you want.
You have effectively no control over the quality of the output from an LLM. You get what the frontier labs give you and must work with that.
It is much easier to control quality of an Ai than of inexperienced developers.
> I am never letting junior to midlevels into my team again
My point is, you control the experience level of the engineers on your team. The fact that you can say you won't let junior or midlevels on your team proves that.
You do not have that level of control with LLMs. Anthropic and OpenAI are roughly the same quality at any given time. The rest are not useful.
I can control LLMs through skills and other gateways.
There are still tasks that LLMs does not really carry out that well, where a proper senior is needed.
Butnthese tasks are quickly disappearing, especially while the code base is slowly being optimized for agentic engineering.
Also, our profession is doomed if we won’t give less experienced colleagues a chance to shine.
From a different one of your posts
So you're the one dooming the profession. Nice work, thank you!
And the developers we need do not jump through the career progression of Junior to senior.
Why the f** would I keep investing in a profession I think is dead or seriously contracting?
I think it would be more depressing taking in exited junior developers, spending years of their life not believing that they are growing into any real career.
> ... the start of their careers
It is exactly this assumption I am challenging.
What comes next, I don't know - and I am not trying to kid myself or any others that I am well suited as a mentor for person starting out their career in the current environment.