This logic doesn’t really track in my experience. Hiring junior devs was never about writing production code. It’s an investment with the understanding that a junior will develop into an intermediate and senior in the future. It generally takes more time to mentor a junior and review their code than to simply code it myself. In addition, doing it myself will certainly result in higher quality, scalable, maintainable code.
This is the contradiction. Many seniors are seeing their productivity decline, because being forced to use AI is like mentoring 1 or 2 or 3 or 4 etc. juniors. The AI doesn’t improve based on your individual mentorship making this a different type of “investment”, if you can even call it that. This isn’t about productivity or investing in labour. It’s about creating a system by which the value of your labour power can be reduced.
My point is that companies hire junior devs in order to train them into senior devs to get more in-house programming ability. Now they can just have their senior devs spin up one more AI agent, so have much less incentive to ever hire juniors.
The newer AI coding tools (Cursor, Claude Code, new new new OpenAI Codex) are much more powerful than even just a year ago, and legitimately feel like force multipliers for senior devs. ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z9UxjmNF7b0 ) Unfortunately, junior devs are too junior to know how to use them to the full extent, and soon will have no job opportunities to ever learn how to become a senior dev.
The programming job market reflects this fact, and has crashed pretty hard for juniors.
I think I agree. If I’m understanding correctly, the point you’re making is that AI coding tools have completely disrupted the market for junior developers, making it near impossible for them to find opportunities. I’ve noticed this as well.
I suppose tech leaders are hoping that by the time the existing market of senior developers begins to retire, that AI coding tools can be used by anyone, making developers redundant. For what it’s worth, I think this is wrong and will be disastrous for the software industry in the long run.
This logic doesn’t really track in my experience. Hiring junior devs was never about writing production code. It’s an investment with the understanding that a junior will develop into an intermediate and senior in the future. It generally takes more time to mentor a junior and review their code than to simply code it myself. In addition, doing it myself will certainly result in higher quality, scalable, maintainable code.
This is the contradiction. Many seniors are seeing their productivity decline, because being forced to use AI is like mentoring 1 or 2 or 3 or 4 etc. juniors. The AI doesn’t improve based on your individual mentorship making this a different type of “investment”, if you can even call it that. This isn’t about productivity or investing in labour. It’s about creating a system by which the value of your labour power can be reduced.
My point is that companies hire junior devs in order to train them into senior devs to get more in-house programming ability. Now they can just have their senior devs spin up one more AI agent, so have much less incentive to ever hire juniors.
The newer AI coding tools (Cursor, Claude Code, new new new OpenAI Codex) are much more powerful than even just a year ago, and legitimately feel like force multipliers for senior devs. ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z9UxjmNF7b0 ) Unfortunately, junior devs are too junior to know how to use them to the full extent, and soon will have no job opportunities to ever learn how to become a senior dev.
The programming job market reflects this fact, and has crashed pretty hard for juniors.
I think I agree. If I’m understanding correctly, the point you’re making is that AI coding tools have completely disrupted the market for junior developers, making it near impossible for them to find opportunities. I’ve noticed this as well.
I suppose tech leaders are hoping that by the time the existing market of senior developers begins to retire, that AI coding tools can be used by anyone, making developers redundant. For what it’s worth, I think this is wrong and will be disastrous for the software industry in the long run.
I found a YouTube link in your comment. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy: