So im having a “issue” that might not be an issue? Ill explain.
Most of work is going full AI. We have around 20 developers. Its about 3/4 that are using AI to do ALL the work with Claude. Earlier in the year, everyone got a ton of AI credits and the amount of “Finished” products have popped out in mass. The amount of projects we have had is skyrocketing.
Now for the problem. Half the projects have terrible bugs. Pages that go no where, bugs that are VERY hard to find in the code (because its filled with code smells). And sometimes the site/program/etc… will just stop working for no reason because they decided to use some old version of react instead of anything modern. Because AI.
Even the ones that work will often be very difficult to debug if its just something the AI did or something the user did.
So a LOT of AI projects are getting abandoned…for more AI remake projects. I cant even call it iterations because no one learned anything making the last project.
Now once in a while I do use AI. It was part of my research back almost 20 years ago. But its mostly for one offs like creating a command line argument in python or give the the reference page for xyz feature. But I dont have it write the entire codebase for me. Seems like a recipe for disaster. And ive seen it bork a couple of peoples machines before.
I dunno am I the old man yells at clouds now?
My problem is that it’s killing the next generation. When used properly, AI is replacing junior work. In a decade, all the current seniors will be a decade older and burning out and there won’t be any new ones to take their places.
That’s by design. Nvidia, OpenAI, Anthropic, etc will fill that void.
Or it will go like Bitcoin where specialty made chips will take over instead of GPUs yet again. And then the big players will go kaput or have to shift as quickly as possible. I think those above are looking for bag holders myself, but I may be too close to the product persay.
It feels SOO much like bitcoin did when it came out. I think the only reason we dont see it happening as much is the algorithms themselves are still in a state of flux. Once we have that done pat, specialty chips can do what software/gpu is doing in parallel at a MUCH faster rate. Also reduces bill of materials. Most of the really interesting models are made by the community and well…china/companies.
Oh I agree with that as well. I have no idea how I would be a junior on this industry now, nor do I even know how to manage juniors anymore given management’s expectations. We’re gonna have a real dearth in some years and I don’t know what’s gonna happen.
This was an issue before LLMs, Senior developers just doing all the work because it was easier and they were under pressure of a deadline. Maybe if a Senior over committed and they had to YOLO with a junior to do a small part to have any chance of meeting expectations, that would be easier to replace with a LLM. But in that case, is a junior really learning anything that they couldn’t by self learning anyway?
If you really think the answer is still yes. There is usually, always something to throw someone at and seeing what sticks, It will just fall in the maintenance realm and not on some critical path. That’s how I was “trained”, got almost no feedback because it wasn’t important, and ultimately failed because I was mislead and had to do it twice.
Training someone up has always been intentional IMO, LLMs just makes “necessary” accidental “training” easier to avoid.
Worse case if a junior is hired, there is work to find for them, and throw them at.