I find it quite naive that senior devs think this will stop with juniors. TFA says "No juniors today means no seniors tomorrow ... juniors must focus on higher-level skills like debugging, system design, and effective collaboration" and yet he believes AI won’t be doing all of that by the time those juniors somehow upskill on their own.
I was just testing the newly released Copilot Agent Mode in VS, and it already looks quite capable of debugging things independently (actually, it's not much different from VS Code Agent Mode, which came out a couple of weeks earlier).
System design? Not all seniors need Google-scale design skills. Most systems designed by seniors are either overdesigned, badly designed, or copied from an article or a case study anyway. There are plenty of seniors whose only real qualification is the number of years they've been working.
The author is from Google. I’m not sure if effective collaboration is something given there, but in many companies, especially outside of tech, it's not something you see often. And it's usually inversely proportional to the company’s age.
What seniors learned by doing is now written down and available to LLMs, often in multiple sources, explained by some of the best minds in the field. Any given senior likely knows only a fraction of a domain, and even less when you start combining domains. LLMs probably already there for some of the seniors, only they never checked.
> What seniors learned by doing is now written down and available to LLMs, often in multiple sources, explained by some of the best minds in the field.
It may shock you to learn that this was true before LLMs. There was a website called "Google" which acted as a front-end for almost all recorded knowledge in human history, and putting a phrase like "best design patterns for web APIs" as a search query (the primitive name for prompts) would give you hundreds, if not thousands of real-life examples and explanations of how to accomplish your goal.
Somehow senior developers kept their jobs despite the existence of this almighty oracle. LLMs do a better job of filtering and customizing the information, but seniors will still keep their jobs.
I was just testing the newly released Copilot Agent Mode in VS, and it already looks quite capable of debugging things independently (actually, it's not much different from VS Code Agent Mode, which came out a couple of weeks earlier).
System design? Not all seniors need Google-scale design skills. Most systems designed by seniors are either overdesigned, badly designed, or copied from an article or a case study anyway. There are plenty of seniors whose only real qualification is the number of years they've been working.
The author is from Google. I’m not sure if effective collaboration is something given there, but in many companies, especially outside of tech, it's not something you see often. And it's usually inversely proportional to the company’s age.
What seniors learned by doing is now written down and available to LLMs, often in multiple sources, explained by some of the best minds in the field. Any given senior likely knows only a fraction of a domain, and even less when you start combining domains. LLMs probably already there for some of the seniors, only they never checked.