I find the tone kind of slapdash. Feel like the author could have condensed it to a small post about using AI agents in certain contexts, as that seems to be the crux of their argument for usefulness in programming.
I do think they have a valid point about some in tech acting squeamish about automation when their whole thing has been automation from day one. Though I also think the idea of AI doing “junior developer” level of work is going to backfire massively on the industry. Seniors start out as juniors and AI is not going to progress fast enough to replace seniors probably within decades (I could see it replacing some seniors, but not on the level of trust and competency that would allow it to replace all of them). But AI could replace a lot of juniors and effectively lock the field into a trajectory of aging itself out of existence, due to it being too hard for enough humans to get the needed experience to take over the senior roles.
Edit: I mean, it’s already the case that dated systems sometimes use languages nobody is learning anymore. That kind of thing could get much worse.
The developer pipeline is the big question here. My experience using these tools is that you absolutely have to know what you’re doing in order to evaluate the code LLMs produce. Right now we have a big pool of senior developers who can wrangle these tools productively and produce good code using them because they understand what the proper solution should look like. However, if new developers start out using these tools directly, without building prior experience by hand, then it might be a lot harder for them to build such intuition for problem solving.
I find the tone kind of slapdash. Feel like the author could have condensed it to a small post about using AI agents in certain contexts, as that seems to be the crux of their argument for usefulness in programming.
I do think they have a valid point about some in tech acting squeamish about automation when their whole thing has been automation from day one. Though I also think the idea of AI doing “junior developer” level of work is going to backfire massively on the industry. Seniors start out as juniors and AI is not going to progress fast enough to replace seniors probably within decades (I could see it replacing some seniors, but not on the level of trust and competency that would allow it to replace all of them). But AI could replace a lot of juniors and effectively lock the field into a trajectory of aging itself out of existence, due to it being too hard for enough humans to get the needed experience to take over the senior roles.
Edit: I mean, it’s already the case that dated systems sometimes use languages nobody is learning anymore. That kind of thing could get much worse.
The developer pipeline is the big question here. My experience using these tools is that you absolutely have to know what you’re doing in order to evaluate the code LLMs produce. Right now we have a big pool of senior developers who can wrangle these tools productively and produce good code using them because they understand what the proper solution should look like. However, if new developers start out using these tools directly, without building prior experience by hand, then it might be a lot harder for them to build such intuition for problem solving.