AWS CEO Matt Garman pushes back on AI replacing junior developers and explains how AI should be used in the workplace.
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The thing people miss in these “replace juniors with AI” takes is that juniors were never mainly about cheap hands on keyboards. They’re the only people in the org who are still allowed to ask “dumb” questions without losing face, and those questions are often the only signal you get that your abstractions are nonsense.
What AI does is remove a bunch of the humiliating, boring parts of being junior: hunting for the right API by cargo-culting Stack Overflow, grinding through boilerplate, getting stuck for hours on a missing import. If a half-decent model can collapse that search space for them, you get to spend more of their ramp time on “here’s how our system actually fits together” instead of “here’s how for-loops work in our house style”.
If you take that setup and then decide “cool, now we don’t need juniors at all”, you’re basically saying you want a company with no memory and no farm system – just an ever-shrinking ring of seniors arguing about strategy while no one actually grows into them.
Always love to include a good AI x work thread in my https://hackernewsai.com/ newsletter.
"without losing face"? What culture are you referring to? The Western companies I have worked at do not discourage such questions -- in fact, it's often the sign of someone very senior when they ask a seemingly 'dumb' question that others have taken for granted.
By socketcluster 2025-12-1723:351 reply Yep, I fully agree with this view and I find that it's seniors who ask the 'dumb' questions. Everyone is worried about losing face in this precarious economy... But seniors are able to ask really smart questions as well so even their dumb questions sound smart... They can usually spin dumb questions into a smart questions by going one level deeper and bringing nuance into the discussion. This may be difficult to do for a junior.
My experience as a team lead working with a lot of juniors is that they are terrified of losing face and tend to talk a big game. As a team lead, I try to use language which expresses any doubts or knowledge gaps I have so that others in my team feel comfortable doing it as well. But a key aspect is that you have to really know your stuff in certain areas because you need to inspire others to mirror you... They won't try to mirror you if they don't respect you, based on your technical ability.
You need to demonstrate deep knowledge in some areas and need to demonstrate excellent reasoning abilities before you can safely ask dumb questions IMO. I try to find the specific strengths and weaknesses of my team members. I give constructive criticism for weaknesses but always try to identify and acknowledge each person's unique superpower; what makes them really stand out within the team. If people feel secure in their 'superpower', then they can be vulnerable in other areas and still feel confident. It's important to correctly identify the 'superpower' though because you don't want a Junior honing a skill that they don't naturally possess or you don't want them to be calling shots when they should be asking for help.
So much this! Both from my experience as Junior very many years ago and also with Juniors (and not so Juniors) today.My experience as a team lead working with a lot of juniors is that they are terrified of losing face
Very big game. Claude does too. The kind of BS it spews in very confident language is amazing.tend to talk a big game
Agree. I also often literally say "Dumb idea: X" to try and suss out areas that may have been left by the wayside and under-explored or where assumptions have been made without verifying them. It's amazing how often even "Seniors"+ will spew assumptions as fact without verification. It's very annoying actually.As a team lead, I try to use language which expresses any doubts or knowledge gaps I have so that others in my team feel comfortable doing it as well
How do you actually do this tho? I would love to do this but it seems hard to find an actual "superpower". Like where does "super" power start vs. "yeah they're better at this than others but definitely not as good as me or "person X that definitely does have that superpower". Like when can you start encouraging so to speak,superpowerBy socketcluster 2025-12-189:51 The fact that you mentioned Claude (LLMs) is interesting! I definitely feel like there is a parallel; maybe because AI sometimes hallucinates, people have built up a tolerance for this kind of speculative use of language from people as well.
About finding the superpower of each team member; after working with someone for a few months, I start to notice certain patterns in how they think. Sometimes there might be something they say once or a question they ask which makes me view them more favorably than before. Maybe they're fast, good at assembling stuff or slow but good at building stable core components. Maybe they're similar to me or maybe they have a skill I don't have or a certain interest/focus or way to approach problems that is different from me but is beneficial to the project and/or team.
It's a bit like playing a weird game of chess where you can't see the pieces properly at the beginning so everyone looks like a pawn initially; But then over time you discover that one person is a knight, another is a bishop, another is a queen... And you adapt your strategy as your visibility improves.
By andrewmutz 2025-12-1719:591 reply Completely agree with this. I got to work closely with an IBM fellow one summer and I was impressed by his willingness to ask "dumb questions" in meetings. Sometimes he was just out of the loop but more often he was just questioning some of the assumptions that others in the room had left unquestioned.
By boston_clone 2025-12-1720:23 Unfortunately, I found that the culture of "think." at IBM is not matched at many other organizations. Most days, I miss it.
But forced RTO and only 10 days off per year is enough to keep me away ;)
100% agree and more credit if I could give it!
Even as a lead I ask the dumb question when no one else does just because when i can see the look in people faces or realize no one is chiming in the dumb question is needed to ensure everyone drives the point home. I've never been met with any sort of looking down upon nor do i discourage any of my staff - quite the opposite - I champion them for being willing to speak up.
in fairness, these do not sound like "dumb" questions.
Some questions really are dumb and bring no value to the table.
The key is knowing which is which, and that is the part that comes with experience.
By noisy_boy 2025-12-181:15 > Some questions really are dumb and bring no value to the table.
They do tell you that the person asking them either isn't getting it, which is valuable information, or that they are trying to ask questions for the sake of it, which is also valuable information.
By darth_avocado 2025-12-1723:34 It depends on the company and the people around you. At one company, my quarterly feedback was that I don’t ask too many questions in meetings, which was mostly due to the fact that the project was pretty straightforward and requirements were hammered down on a document. In another company, asking questions got me the feedback that I was maybe not experienced enough to manage the project by myself, which I was completely capable of. It’s a double edged sword.
But yes on a personal level, being senior enough in my career, I’d rather be thought of as less skilled by asking questions before the s hits the fan, than execute and mismanage a project that I didn’t ask enough questions on. The latter has more consequences tbh.
By reactordev 2025-12-1720:072 reply Company culture. Some companies I worked for would fire you for questioning decisions. Others, welcomed criticism. You don’t really know which environment you’re in until someone says something. Are you going to take the risk and be the first?
By JohnFen 2025-12-1722:37 > Are you going to take the risk and be the first?
Absolutely. If the company I work for happens to be one that's so crappy that I'd get fired for questioning things, it's better to find that out as soon as possible. That's not a company that's worth my time and attention.
Yes, because i would rather not work at such company and go somewhere else.
By reactordev 2025-12-1720:57 In this market you might not have a choice but to stick it out a while
Think of highly competitive environments where looking foolish can be weaponised against you. They definitely exist here (my experience in UK and Australia)
By shakna 2025-12-183:29 IBM Aus discouraged it, Accenture, Concentrix, EY, CommBank, ANZ, and others all encouraged it, for myself.
I wouldn't say discouraging it will be the norm across most places in Australia.
By awesome_dude 2025-12-1723:161 reply My entire career - New Zealand, and Australia - asking questions is weaponised (as I stated above)
Graduate, Junior, Senior, Team Lead, - my title hasn't mattered to the response
You're working in toxic workplaces. Most of them aren't like this.
(I believe you when you say that most of yours are like this.)
By kennyloginz 2025-12-185:21 Unionize
By globalnode 2025-12-1722:371 reply some of the descriptions above of thoughtful supportive work places where people are free to explore different ideas and question assumptions sound like paradise.
By awesome_dude 2025-12-1723:17 Or judged via rose coloured spectacles.
I am bit more senior nowadays.
Whenever I don’t understand something I say something like: "Uh, I’m probably the only one here, but I don’t get it…"
By Rodeoclash 2025-12-1721:262 reply I'm the CTO and probably one of the most common things I'll say is "help me understand X"
By darth_avocado 2025-12-1723:29 There’s power dynamics that come into play when you’re a C level executive. You’re allowed to ask questions. For entry level employees, asking questions almost always comes with a judgement of lower skills/experience. This is often what senior and experienced folk forget, there’s a certain amount of assumed competence when you asked questions, that doesn’t get assigned to newer people.
By tracker1 2025-12-1722:53 My favorite CTO/CIO acronym is "PFM". Such as, "and then we run through the PFM process, and it comes out and does..."
PFM - Pure Fucking Magic
I've only once ever had anyone actually ask what it means... essentially it's used as an abstraction for a complex process that would be excessive to explain in context.
I asked, after the meeting.
By Spooky23 2025-12-1722:02 There are a lot of bad places to work, and those are the types of places that do things like replace junior devs with AI.
The place I work at is in the middle of a new CEO’s process of breaking the company. The company can’t go out of business, but we’ll set stuff on fire for another 12-18 months.
By xeromal 2025-12-1720:43 Yup, my SR Director boss often says "I'm an idiot. Can you tell me what 'X' means when most of us probably wanted to know but were too afraid to ask
By tracker1 2025-12-1722:48 That's been my experience as someone who tends to ask them regularly. I don't have a lot of hubris when it comes down to it, so I'll almost always ask. Especially acronyms or industry/insider business terms... I'll usually do a quick search in a browser, but if the results don't make sense, will simply ask.
Asking stupid questions almost goes hands in glove with "it's easier to ask forgiveness than permission." A lot of times, you're better off just doing something. Asking a simple question or making something happen saves a lot of grief more often than not. Understanding is important.
I don't think that's the same. I spitball crazy ideas, but my core knowledge/expertise is sound, and I try not to talk out of my ass. (Or I am upfront when I'm outside my area of expertise. I think it's important to call that out once your word starts carrying some weight.)
A product manager can definitely say things that would make me lose a bit of respect for a fellow senior engineer.
I can also see how juniors have more leeway to weigh in on things they absolutely don't understand. Crazy ideas and constructive criticism is welcome from all corners, but at some level I also start expecting some more basic competence.
By lanstin 2025-12-1721:34 In general there are so many different sub-fields of knowledge that it's extremely confining to stay in one area of expertise; the slow uneducated person that has been working to keep some giant build farm running and migrating projects and helping fix tickets for 5 years will have a lot of expertise you don't have if you have a more casual experience of the system.
By ben_w 2025-12-1723:42 Company culture != national culture != personal culture. Such things can be all over the place.
I've worked with people from Korea who took me 100% seriously when I said the architecture was too complex and hard to work with slowing down velocity, and although they did end up keeping it there was no outward indication of lost face and they did put in the effort to justify their thinking.
I've also worked with some British, Greek, and Russian people who were completely unwilling to listen to any feedback from coworkers, only order them around.
Even within a person: I know a self-identified communist, who is very open minded about anything except politics.
My cousin, when he got his first job, he managed to wipe the database clean on his first day at work. (classic, I know)
The seniors were very understanding, and more importantly it raised important questions about backups, dev vs prod pipelines, etc.
But you can bet my cousin was super embarrassed by it, and saving face was a big part of it.
By mv4 2025-12-1723:04 I found this varies.
Meta? Ask questions anytime.
Amazon? Not so much.
There’s also the benefit of being naive - like, juniors can be seriously audacious when they haven’t been burned a million times. I miss having excitement and optimism.
By aut0m8d 2025-12-181:54 This is huge and quite underrated I think. There are some angles that are really hard to see through a weathered lens.
By marcus_holmes 2025-12-182:30 the flip side of this is having juniors create some wildly unrealistic expectations in other business units if we're not careful ;)
By apercu 2025-12-1722:46 Culture varies.
By kelipso 2025-12-1722:57 I don’t know..this seems like one of those that is admired in HN but I don’t see in any of the multiple US companies that I’ve worked in. People are definitely concerned with looking dumb. “Losing face” may be something people here attribute to Oriental Cultures, but in practice it works similarly here too.
By sharkweek 2025-12-183:45 Best VP I’ve ever had would stop meetings with regular frequency and say, “maybe I’m the dumbest person here, but I don’t understand [insert something being discussed], can you help me get a better understanding?”
It was anybody’s guess if they really didn’t understand the topic or if they were reading the room, but it was always appreciated.
By awesome_dude 2025-12-1723:102 reply My Entire career
"Why the f*ck are you asking, you should know this"
or
"Why the f*ck can you not look that up"
edit: There's an entire chapter of the internet with "LMGTFY" responses because people ask questions.
or
"Isn't it f*cking obvious"
or
"Do I have to f*cking spell it out for you"
There's a strong chance that I am autistic, which means, yes, I need people to be (more) explicit.
AI has done a hell of a good job making it easier for me to search for subtexts that I typically miss. And I receive less of the negative feedback when I have something to ask that does help.
By versteegen 2025-12-184:08 A completely flipped perspective:
> "Why the f*ck are you asking, you should know this"
Because you mentioned NZ: my father, a toolmaker, said there was a huge difference between Europe and NZ. In Germany/Netherlands, he'd be working under a more senior toolmaker. When he took a job in NZ and asked the boss something, as would have been the proper thing to do in Europe, he got a response just like that: because he was the expert, and his NZ boss was just a manager.
By jamblewamble 2025-12-1723:371 reply Asking questions is a good thing but that doesnt mean ALL questions. It doesnt include questions you could answer with a google search or by reading documentation, obviously.
By awesome_dude 2025-12-1723:422 reply Got it - ask questions, but not ones that you already know where the answer is.
edit: well, except when you search the documentation and get (literally) 70+ results because you don't know the exact phrasing used in the self hosted wiki...
Or, when it's a question that is domain specific (meaning that the SME is supposed to know it, which you only know if you are... an SME...)
etc
Provide context when asking.
: “hey bob, I looked here and here and here and didn’t find the correct information. Can you show me where to look or tell me the answer so I can document it”
Because most people don’t bother doing the tiniest amount of their own research before asking dumb questions it becomes a huge headache to answer the same thing a million times.
However, if you can show that you did put in the effort to look up the answer first people will be much more willing to help.
By awesome_dude 2025-12-184:28 So far I have two examples (in this thread) of people making (potentially toxic) judgements about the fact that someone asked a question
Can you show why you assumed that what you are asking for wasn't provided?
Can you also explain why your response is to make rather harsh judgements rather than work out what was going on in the first place?
By watwut 2025-12-188:56 > Got it - ask questions, but not ones that you already know where the answer is.
More of, ask do the quick google search or check the doc before asking that question. If the quick search or look into the doc does not contain the answer, ask.
By lanstin 2025-12-1721:31 I have worked at a place where people were routinely criticized for asking basic questions on a big all-dev DL (which was archived and searchable, so they actually added to a growing record). The preferred solution was to ask a co-worker on the same team. People were answered a lot of questions were also criticized for being helpful. In neither case was the criticism that much from devs but from managers and given in boss feedback directly to people. Also it had a problem with spreading a good culture and common technical vision to new people, for some reason ( /s )
By giancarlostoro 2025-12-1719:571 reply > They’re the only people in the org who are still allowed to ask “dumb” questions without losing face
I strongly disagree, a Senior who cannot ask a "dumb question" is a useless developer to me. Ask away, we want to figure things out, we're not mind readers. Every good senior developer I know asks questions and admits when they don't know things. This is humility and in my eyes is a strong market for a good Senior Developer. The entire point of our job is to ask questions (to ourselves typically the most) and figure out the answers (the code).
Juniors could or should ask more questions, and by the time you're a Senior, you're asking key questions no matter how dumb they sound.
By cloudfudge 2025-12-1721:04 You're making the same point as the person you're responding to. They're saying seniors are allowed to ask dumb questions. It's junior who are often afraid to do so.
By johnfn 2025-12-1721:37 > The thing people miss in these “replace juniors with AI” takes is that juniors were never mainly about cheap hands on keyboards. They’re the only people in the org who are still allowed to ask “dumb” questions without losing face, and those questions are often the only signal you get that your abstractions are nonsense.
This seems almost entirely wrong to me? That anyone, at any level of seniority, can ask "dumb questions" and give signal about "nonsense abstractions" seems a property of any healthy organization. That only juniors can do this doesn't just seem wrong, it seems backwards. I would expect seniors to have the clearest idea on whether abstractions make sense, not juniors.
By veunes 2025-12-189:51 I agree, the routine is gone, but at what cost? Understanding "how our system fits together" means solving problems, reading code, and debugging. If those fundamental skills aren't built through "humiliating and boring" tasks, how will a junior understand how the system actually works, not just how it appears to work?
This is a really good and under appreciated point. My recommendation to mid-level, senior, and staff engineers is to keep questioning decisions and create a culture where that’s encouraged.
Junior devs do that naturally (if you have the culture) because they don’t know anything already. It’s great
> My recommendation to mid-level, senior, and staff engineers is to keep questioning decisions and create a culture where that’s encouraged.
Tell me you've never worked at FAANG without telling me you've never worked at FAANG...
I’ve worked at a couple FAANG and questioning things is pretty much always viewed as a positive when it’s done in a productive and professional manner
What isn’t viewed positively is when you refuse to accept a decision after it’s been made and your concerns have been heard. People get pissed if you keep relitigating the same points over and over again
By kyralis 2025-12-186:59 My advice to engineer is always:
Your job is to make sure that the decision makers, when they're not you, have the information needed to make competent decisions. You should keep arguing when (a) there is credible reason to believe that important information has not been heard or understood or (b) when new information has come to light that you credibly believe might change the decision. In the absence of those two, your should accept that you have done your job and should let your managers to theirs, even if you disagree with them. Bring it back up when (a) or (b) changes, and not until.
I've worked in various teams on the infrastructure side of a FAANG from early career/L4 to sr staff eng/L7 and have always been encouraged and rewarded for asking questions, even when those questions have led to unexpected multimillion dollar costs and in one case a loss of ~1% of fleetwide compute capacity.
I think this comes down to how you go about asking. You have to take the time to understand what is and how it's seen by others by being curious, reading docs, etc instead of rolling in making assertions disguised as questions to assert authority like so many are wont to do.
I suppose it's possible that I'm the designated court jester and that's why I can get away with questioning, but I don't think that's the case :)
By iyihz 2025-12-181:08 How did the questions lead to costs? Like your questions highlighted issues that already existed that you all then had to fix?
By ebiester 2025-12-1719:48 Some of us intentionally avoid FAANG for that reason.
By kyralis 2025-12-186:56 As a staff engineer at FAANG... tell me you've never worked at FAANG without telling me you've never worked at FAANG.
I've given talks on work/life balance -- and I stand by those talks enough to argue with directors and above when needed, though it rarely is -- and an important part of that talk is about how much better it can look when you can intelligently describe the limits of your knowledge, skills, and estimation.
If you get penalized for that, you're just in a shit role with a shit manager. Don't project that on the rest of us.
By tyre 2025-12-1722:45 I’ve never worked at a FAANG and have no intention to.
I did work at Stripe, which in places did this pretty well. It still felt like a huge company (this was back in 2022) that had lost part of that spirit depending on org leadership. I had to pull that out of engineers who had been scared out of that level of vulnerability. But building that trust is part of leadership and great people tend to want to question and improve things.
By iwontberude 2025-12-1719:506 reply Usually the people who question decisions are shot down because they don’t have a wholistic understanding of the decision and (respectfully) don’t have good arguments. This is only because they are focused on some narrow aspect of the business which distorts or reduces their visibility and understanding.
By wkat4242 2025-12-1720:12 One of the most regulated industries, aviation requires crews to go through crew management training where it's explicitly trained for lower level staff to raise concerns in spite of perceived superior knowledge.
Some of the biggest accidents have happened directly due to this. Like Tenerife where the flight engineer had been listening to the radio and raised doubts about the runway being free but was ignored by the overconfident captain.
By lanstin 2025-12-183:27 This thinking pattern exactly illustrates how a group of very intelligent people can make disasterously bad decisions without anyone challenging them. Don't look for holes in the the arguments of people saying you are making a bad decision, look for the information they have that you do not have or have not explicitly analyzed. If you think you have all the information that the org possesses, go right ahead and make your choices without others; you might be lucky and be Steve Jobs post 2000.
> This is only because they are focused on some narrow aspect of the business
Is this a bad thing though? If some technical decision has downside risk, I’d reasonably expect:
- the affected stakeholder to bring it up
- the decision maker to assuage the stakeholder’s concern (happy path) or triage and escalate
By iwontberude 2025-12-1720:26 I think you are right. It's still worth encouraging people to question decisions even though most of the time it won't be the right compromise for the business.
By watwut 2025-12-189:24 > Usually the people who question decisions are shot down because they don’t have a wholistic understanding of the decision and (respectfully) don’t have good arguments.
It takes months of dysfunction until the customer says "I do not want to work with you anymore" or until the "overtime and over budget" thing suddenly becomes too large and problems show up in numbers. Or until key team suddenly completely decomposes. Every single time I have seen that, multiple people tried to communicate about the issue and were shot down.
It is not like management was always "wholistically" right and everyone down there just dont see big picture or have bad arguments - they usually just do not know what is going on on lower levels. Failure to actually listen, whether because it feels bad or because it would take time is quite common.
By fn-mote 2025-12-1722:32 This is definitely a best case scenario.
As important as I think questioning is, there’s another side of it where people push their own agenda with questions on topics that were decided by other/more senior people hashing it out. At some point this does need to be dealt with. All I see is the yapping questions wasting meeting time, though.
By AdrianB1 2025-12-1720:24 I don't know how to calculate "usually", in my experience people who question decisions in my company are shot down because the decision makers are usually (no pun intended) very incompetent and the questions make that visible, even if not intended. Many companies that I know are so corrupt that competent people are considered to be dangerous for the status quo.
By MrChoke 2025-12-184:01 Most of us haven't, good for you
So, I think there are two models.
One is a "one junior per team" model. I endorse this for exactly the reasons you speak.
Another, as I recently saw, was a 70/30 model of juniors to seniors. You make your seniors as task delegators and put all implementation on the junior developers. This puts an "up or out" pressure and gives very little mentorship opportunities. if 70% of your engineers are under 4 years of experience, it can be a rough go.
That second model is basically the hospital model.
You have 1 veteran doctor overseeing 4 learning doctors. For example operating rooms do this, where they will have 4 operating rooms with 4 less experienced anesthesist and then 1 very experienced anesthesist who will rotate between the 4 and is on call for when shit hits the fan.
Honestly I think everyone here is missing the forest for the trees. Juniors their main purpose isn't to "ask questions", it's to turn into capable seniors.
That's also why the whole "slash our junior headcount by 3/4th" we are seeing across the industry is going to massively, massively backfire. AI / LLMs are going to hit a wall (well, they already hit it a while ago), suddenly every is scrambling for seniors but there are none because no one wanted to bear the 'burden' of training juniors to be seniors. You thought dev salaries are insane now? Wait until 4-5 years from now.
By marcosdumay 2025-12-1720:551 reply I guess Peopleware couldn't get every single thing right.
A hospital model may be a good idea. One where you have a senior programmer and many junior ones doing most tasks isn't. IMO, something closer to a real hospital team, where you have experts of different disciplines, and maybe a couple of juniors composing the team has much higher chances of success.
> something closer to a real hospital team, where you have experts of different disciplines
That is not how hospitals work. The surgery departement won't have a crack team of different disciplines to teach budding surgeons everything. They'll only have veteran surgeons to guide less-experienced surgeons.
What you will have is interdepartmental cooperation / hand-off, and you'll have multi-discipline roles like surgical oncologist.
In the same way, you won't have devops seniors training front-end juniors.
By marcosdumay 2025-12-1721:22 A surgery team has a surgeon an anesthesiologist, a nurse specialized on material handling overseeing the material usage in the procedure, maybe a nurse specialized on equipment handling. None of those people are junior or subordinated to the others.
By tetha 2025-12-1723:42 In my operational team, I'm following a third model, inspired by german trade workers. You have juniors, journeymen and masters. Juniors are generally clueless and need to be told what to do, specifically. This is very much the level of "Here are 28 marks that needs bolts placed in concrete, make it so, I can explain why". Journeymen should be figuring out a plan how to solve a project and challenge it with the master to see if it fits the quality requirements of the master.
And practically, you can have one or two journeymen per master. However, these 2-3 people can in turn support 3-4 more juniors to supply useful work.
This also establishes a fairly natural growth of a person within the company. First you do standard things as told. Then you start doing projects that mostly follow a standard that has worked in the past. And then you start standardizing projects.
By lanstin 2025-12-183:37 My first big job was the 1 junior per team; those years were extremely good for learning how to design and write high performance services. Since then, I've mostly been at the 70/30 places where I'm considered senior. Occasionally I just sit down and blast out a big software project, just to feel I am still able, but mostly I tend the garden hoping that a few of the fragile stems will survive and grow into mighty oaks.
By AdrianB1 2025-12-1720:28 With the subjective view on what a junior is, I think the 70-30 - or higher - model is used in any company I ever interacted with. For this evaluation I consider junior=someone with less skills than needed to do the job autonomously/require direction and supervision most time, senior=someone that can work autonomously.
By never_inline 2025-12-186:131 reply If that was the case I would be chilling during my junior years.
Juniors are usually given either grunt or low priority work while seniors get more "important" work.
OTOH, it takes a lot to get your questions on RIGHT EARS when you're a junior, so wouldn't agree with your characterization at all.
By int_19h 2025-12-187:51 It really depends on the workspace. Some places will give juniors serious work items specifically to grow them.
By HeavyStorm 2025-12-1721:22 I sense a lot of hate/baggage in this post subtext.
Really, juniors are only important because they ask "dumb" questions that can help remove useless abstractions? That your take?
I think the biggest challenge now becomes how more seasoned engineers teach juniors. The AI makes the ramp a lot easier but you still do best when you understand the whole stack and make mistakes.
It’s damned near impossible to figure out where to spend your time wisely to correct an assumption a human made vs. an AI on a blended pull request. All of the learning that happens during PR review is at risk in this way and I’m not sure where we will get it back yet. (Outside of an AI telling you - which, to be fair, there are some good review bots out there)
By startupsfail 2025-12-1720:30 Junior engineers now learn from AIs. And AIs now learn from RL cost functions. And RL cost functions are being set by PhDs, with little to no production grade engineering experience ;)
The result is interesting. First, juniors are miserable. What used to be a good experience coding and debugging, in a state of flow is now anxiously waiting if an AI could do it or not.
And senior devs are also miserable, getting apprentices used to be fun and profit, working with someone young is uplifting, and now it is gone.
The code quality is going down, Zen cycle interrupted, with the RL cost functions now at the top.
The only ones who are happy are hapless PhDs ;$
By PunchyHamster 2025-12-182:02 I don't think many orgs learn all that much from coaching their juniors, at least after first few.
Juniors are just... necessary in the balance, have to little of them and the mid and senior devs will get more and more expensive, so you hire a bunch of juniors, they get trained on job, and it balances it out.
Hell, if company does it right they might underpay junior-turned-senior for decade before they notice and look how industry pay looks like!
By TheGRS 2025-12-180:10 I don't agree that this is the central value juniors provide. Its a nice tertiary value, but not why one hires them. I think the value is the later part of farming for new talent and just growing your team.
I still think the central issue is the economy. There are more seniors available to fill roles, so filling out junior roles is less desirable. And perhaps "replacing juniors with AI" is just the industry's way of clumsily saving face.
By marcosdumay 2025-12-1720:42 Yes, the most helpful things AIs do is to guide people into popular environments they don't know very well.
Or in other words, the people that get the most value from AI are junior devs, since they still don't know very well plenty of popular environments. It's also useful for seniors that are starting something in a new environment, but those only get 1 or 2 novel contexts at a time, while everything is new for a junior.
Or, in again another set of words, AI enable juniors to add more value more quickly. That makes them more valuable, not less.
By Waterluvian 2025-12-1721:45 That's a perplexing take based on how I've experienced the past 15 years: the more senior someone is, the more questions they tend to ask.
By epgui 2025-12-1722:52 I’m a senior engineer on a staff track, I am proud to ask “dumb” questions all the time, and I don’t want to work somewhere where I don’t feel safe pursuing knowledge openly and candidly.
By frtime2025 2025-12-1720:031 reply AI will replace jobs. People are putting their IT/dev budget into something, which means something else will be cut.
I also don’t believe juniors, kids, seniors, staff, principals, distinguished/fellow should be replaced by AI. I think they WILL be, but they shouldn’t be. AI at Gemini 3 Flash / Claude Opus 4.5 level is capable with help and review of doing a lot of what a lot of devs do currently. It can’t do everything and will fail, but if the business doesn’t care, they’ll cut jobs.
Don’t waste time trying to argue against AI to attempt to save your job. Just learn AI and do your job until you’re no longer needed to even manage it. Or, if you don’t want to, do something else.
By marcosdumay 2025-12-1720:58 > People are putting their IT/dev budget into something, which means something else will be cut.
That's not how things work in normal times.
But normal times require minimally capable managers, a somewhat competitive economy, and some meritocracy in hiring. I can believe that's how things will work this time, but it's still a stupid way to do it.
Agree.
> cargo-culting Stack Overflow
What do you mean by this? I understand “cargo-culting” as building false idols, e.g. wooden headphones and runways to attract airplanes that never come.
By kjellsbells 2025-12-1720:29 It means to copy code or instructions from a site into your own project without having any comprehension of how or why it works.
example: you have a Windows problem. You search and read that "sfc /scannow" seems a popular answer to Windows problems. You run it without ever understanding what sfc does, whether the tool is relevant to your problem, etc. You are cargo culting a solution.
By PaulStatezny 2025-12-1721:05 I think the idea is copy-pasting code snippets from StackOverflow without comprehension of whether (and how) the code fixes the problem.
By kunley 2025-12-1720:34 Cargo-cult in relation to programming exists since late 80s.
http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/C/cargo-cult-programming.htm...
By citizenpaul 2025-12-180:31 The real thing people miss is not AI replacing Juniors. Its that senior management soured on hiring juniors even a few years before AI, almost across all industries.
AI is now just the scapegoat for an economy wide problem. Execs found "one neat trick", piling junior work on seniors until they quit. While not hiring replacements in order to goose short term profits. Now every company is in the same position where hiring a senior really means hiring 5 seniors to replace the one that had 5 jobs layered on over a few years. This is of course impossible for any mortal to jump into. Now they also dont even have juniors to train up to senior levels.
By protocolture 2025-12-186:08 >They’re the only people in the org who are still allowed to ask “dumb” questions without losing face
This is the only role of executives, sales people, account managers. They usually do it with complete and utter confidence too. Vibe-questioning and vibe-instructing other people without a care in the world.
By flyinglizard 2025-12-1722:341 reply Good juniors are also great at just working. Usually no family so they are able to put in a lot of attention into work and they have that innocent curiosity and can-do in them which brings a lot of positive energy.
By never_inline 2025-12-186:14 > put in a lot of attention into work and they have that innocent curiosity
They're also good at putting company code into ChatGPT.
/snark
By jppope 2025-12-1719:42 This is actually a super power I have after spending my first part of my career in sales.
I was never formally trained so I just keep asking "why" until someone proves it all the way. Sales itself is also a lot about asking questions that won't come up to find the heart of the thing people actually want... which is just another side of the coin.
I mean, that’s an interesting take, but “having people around to ask dumb questions” is not why most orgs hire juniors.
By lingrush4 2025-12-1721:25 In my experience, juniors are absolutely terrified of asking any sort of question at all during a meeting. Senior engineers are far more likely to ask interesting, useful questions.
We hire juniors so that we can offload easy but time-consuming work on them while we focus on more important or more difficult problems. We also expect that juniors will eventually gain the skills to solve the more difficult problems as a result of the experience they gain performing the easy tasks.
If we stop hiring juniors now, then we won't have any good senior engineers in 5-10 years.
By throwaway894345 2025-12-185:38 I think the main benefit of junior devs is that it’s the only pipeline for getting senior devs. The other benefit over AI is that most of software engineering is not writing the code, but doing all of the other stuff like working out what to build, flagging concerns, operating the software once it is running, etc.
By SecretDreams 2025-12-185:17 I'll also add the obvious answer in that real companies constantly have seniors leaving/retiring. Juniors are meant to be trained up to be the future seniors of the company. You should consistently feed and grow this pipeline unless you think you won't exist in the future or AI will replace all jobs, period.
By hiddencost 2025-12-1719:24 Yikes. Sounds like you work for a toxic company. The mid and senior level engineers I know all go out of their way to ask the dumb questions. Every junior employee I've mentored, I've told them the main way they can fail is not asking questions early and often. Gotta build a culture that supports questions.
By iwontberude 2025-12-1719:42 [flagged]
What will eventually pan out is that senior devs will be replaced with junior devs powered by AI assistants. Simply because of the reasons you stated. They will ask the dumb important questions and then after a while, will even solve for them.
Now that their minds are free from routine and boilerplate work, they will start asking more 'whys' which will be very good for the organization overall.
Take any product - nearly 50% of the features are unused and it's a genuine engineering waste to maintain those features. A junior dev spending 3 months on the code base with Claude code will figure out these hidden unwanted features, cull them or ask them to be culled.
It'll take a while to navigate the hierarchy but they'll figure it out. The old guard will have no option but to move up or move out.
By throwway120385 2025-12-1719:561 reply Why would Claude code help you find unused features? The end customer uses features, not the AI. I would want to know from the end customer whether a feature is unused, and a Junior with an LLM assistant is not going to be able to tell me that without adding new features to the code base.
By deepGem 2025-12-1723:55 Am using Claude code as an approximation here. 2 years down the line the tooling around analytics will get integrated in AU assistants and they will be absolutely able to figure out unused features.
By alwa 2025-12-1720:19 How do you suppose the old guard are filling their days now?
At some level, aren’t you describing the age-old process of maturing from junior to mid level to senior in most lines of work, and in most organizations? Isn’t that what advancing in responsibility boils down to: developing subtlety and wisdom and political credibility and organizational context? Learning where the rakes are?
I wish 3 months, or even 3 years, were long enough to fully understand the whys and wherefores and politics of the organizations I cross paths with, and the jungle of systems and code supporting all the kinds of work that happen inside…
Relevant post by Kent Beck from 12th Dec 2025: The Bet On Juniors Just Got Better https://tidyfirst.substack.com/p/the-bet-on-juniors-just-got...
> The juniors working this way compress their ramp dramatically. Tasks that used to take days take hours. Not because the AI does the work, but because the AI collapses the search space. Instead of spending three hours figuring out which API to use, they spend twenty minutes evaluating options the AI surfaced. The time freed this way isn’t invested in another unprofitable feature, though, it’s invested in learning. [...]
> If you’re an engineering manager thinking about hiring: The junior bet has gotten better. Not because juniors have changed, but because the genie, used well, accelerates learning.
Isn't the struggling with docs and learning how and where to find the answers part of the learning process?
I would argue a machine that short circuits the process of getting stuck in obtuse documentation is actually harmful long term...
By chaos_emergent 2025-12-1718:337 reply Isn't the struggle of sifting through a labyrinth of physical books and learning how and where to find the right answers part of the learning process?
I would argue a machine that short-circuits the process of getting stuck in obtuse books is actually harmful long term...
By beAbU 2025-12-1810:07 I'm not sure what you are trying to say here, or if you are trying to somehow diminish my statement by somehow claiming that online documentation is causing the same magnitude of harm compared to using a book?
Two things:
1 - I agree with you. A good printed resource is incredibly valuable and should be perfectly valid in this day and age.
2 - many resources are not in print, e.g. API docs, so I'm not sure how books are supposed to help here.
It may well be. Books have tons of useful expository material that you may not find in docs. A library has related books sitting in close proximity to one another. I don't know how many times I've gone to a library looking for one thing but ended up finding something much more interesting. Or to just go to the library with no end goal in mind...
By calepayson 2025-12-1718:473 reply Speaking as a junior, I’m happy to do this on my own (and do!).
Conversations like this are always well intentioned and friction truly is super useful to learning. But the ‘…’ in these conversations seems to always be implicating that we should inject friction.
There’s no need. I have peers who aren’t interested in learning at all. Adding friction to their process doesn’t force them to learn. Meanwhile adding friction to the process of my buddies who are avidly researching just sucks.
If your junior isn’t learning it likely has more to do with them just not being interested (which, hey, I get it) than some flaw in your process.
Start asking prospective hires what their favorite books are. It’s the easiest way to find folks who care.
By weakfish 2025-12-1719:07 I’ll also make the observation that the extra time spent is very valuable if your objective solely is learning, but often the Business™ needs require something working ASAP
By sfpotter 2025-12-1719:21 You're reading a lot into my ellipsis that isn't there. :-)
Please read it as: "who knows what you'll find if you take a stop by the library and just browse!"
By alwa 2025-12-1720:48 I admire your attitude and the clarity of your thought.
It’s not as if today’s juniors won’t have their own hairy situations to struggle through, and I bet those struggles will be where they learn too. The problem space will present struggles enough: where’s the virtue in imposing them artificially?
This should be possible online, it would be if more journals were open access.
Disagree, actually. Having spent a lot of time publishing papers in those very journals, I can tell you that just browsing a journal is much less conducive to discovering a new area to dive into than going to a library and reading a book. IME, books tend to synthesize and collect important results and present them in an understandable (pedagogical?!) way that most journals do not, especially considering that many papers (nowadays) are written primarily to build people's tenure packets and secure grant funding. Older papers aren't quite so bad this way (say, pre-2000).
By bee_rider 2025-12-1722:48 I think I don’t disagree. Only, it would at least be easier to trace the research concept you are interested in up to a nice 70’s paper or a textbook.
By usefulcat 2025-12-1718:43 You could make much the same observation about online search results.
By GeoAtreides 2025-12-1718:48 When I first opened QBasic, <N> years ago, when I was a wee lad, the online QBasic help didn't replace my trusty qbasic book (it supplemented it, maybe), nor did it write the programs for me. It was just there, doing nothing, waiting for me to press F1.
AI, on the other hand...
By deepsquirrelnet 2025-12-183:111 reply It’s an interesting question isn’t it? There are obvious qualities about being able to find information quickly and precisely. However, the search becomes much narrower, and what must inevitably result is a homogeneity of outcomes.
Eventually we will have to somehow convince AI of new and better ways of doing things. It’ll be propaganda campaigns waged by humans to convince God to deploy new instructions to her children.
By 627467 2025-12-183:47 > inevitably result is a homogeneity of outcomes
And this outcome will be obvious very quickly for most observers won't it? So, the magic will occur by pushing AI beyond another limit or just have people go back to specialize on what eventually will becoming boring and procedural until AI catches up
By mplewis 2025-12-1721:01 You posted this in jest but it's literally true. You need to read the whole book to get the context. You SHOULD be reading the manuals and the docs. They weren't written because they're fun.
By ori_b 2025-12-1718:40 Well, yes -- this is why I still sit down and read the damn books. The machine is useful to refresh my memory.
By thinkingemote 2025-12-1719:24 learning to learn
I recall similar arguments being made against search engines: People who had built up a library of internal knowledge about where and how to find things didn't like that it had become so easy to search for resources.
The arguments were similar, too: What will you do if Google goes down? What if Google gives the wrong answer? What if you become dependent on Google? Yet I'm willing to bet that everyone reading this uses search engines as a tool to find what they need quickly on a daily basis.
By CharlieDigital 2025-12-1719:13 I argue that there is a strong, strong benefit to reading the docs: you often pick up additional context and details that would be missing in a summary.
Microsoft docs are a really good example of this where just looking through the ToC on the left usually exposes me to some capability or feature of the tooling that 1) I was not previously aware of and 2) I was not explicitly searching for.
The point is that the path to a singular answer can often include discovery of unrelated insight along the way. When you only get the answer to what you are asking, you lose that process of organic discovery of the broader surface area of the tooling or platform you are operating in.
I would liken AI search/summaries to visiting only the well-known, touristy spots. Sure, you can get shuttled to that restaurant or that spot that everyone visits and posts on socials, but in traveling that way, you will miss all of the other amazing food, shops, and sights along the way that you might encounter by walking instead. Reading the docs is more like exploring the random nooks and crannies and finding experiences you weren't expecting and ultimately knowing more about the place you visited than if you had only visited the major tourist destinations.
As a senior-dev, I have generally a good idea of what to ask for because I have built many systems and learned many things along the way. A junior dev? They may not know what to ask for and therefore, may never discover those "detours" that would yield additional insights to tuck into the manifolds of their brains for future reference. For the junior dev, it's like the only trip they will experience is one where they just go to the well known tourist traps instead of exploring and discovering.
By raw_anon_1111 2025-12-184:28 I have been online since 1993 on Usenet. That was definitely not a widespread belief. We thought DejaNews was a godsend.
By Cpoll 2025-12-1720:00 It's possible those arguments are correct. I wouldn't give up Google and SO, but I suspect I was learning faster when my first stop was K&R or a man page. There's a lot of benefit in building your own library of knowledge instead of cribbing from someone else's.
Of course no-one's stopping a junior from doing it the old way, but no-one's teaching them they can, either.
By rafaelmn 2025-12-1719:14 No, trying stuff out is the valuable process. How I search for information changed (dramatically) in the last 20 years I've been programming. My intuition about how programs work is still relevant - you'll still see graybeards saying "there's a paper from 70s talking about that" for every "new" fad in programming, and they are usually right.
So if AI gets you iterating faster and testing your assumptions/hypothesis I would say that's a net win. If you're just begging it to solve the problem for you with different wording - then yeah you are reducing yourself to a shitty LLM proxy.
By tencentshill 2025-12-1718:442 reply The naturally curious will remain naturally curious and be rewarded for it, everyone else will always take the shortest path offered to complete the task.
> The naturally curious will remain naturally curious and be rewarded for it
Maybe. The naturally curious will also typically be slower to arrive at a solution due to their curiosity and interest in making certain they have all the facts.
If everyone else is racing ahead, will the slowpokes be rewarded for their comprehension or punished for their poor metrics?
By rgoulter 2025-12-181:18 > If everyone else is racing ahead, will the slowpokes be rewarded for their comprehension or punished for their poor metrics?
It's always possible to go slower (with diminishing benefits).
Or I think putting it in terms of benefits and risks/costs: I think it's fair to have "fast with shallow understanding" and "slower but deeper understanding" as different ends of some continuum.
I think what's preferable somewhat depends on context & attitude of "what's the cost of making a mistake?". If making a mistake is expensive, surely it's better to take an approach which has more comprehensive understanding. If mistakes are cheap, surely faster iteration time is better.
The impact of LLM tools? LLM tools increase the impact of both cases. It's quicker to build a comprehensive understanding by making use of LLM tools, similar to how stuff like autocompletion or high-level programming languages can speed up development.
By marcosdumay 2025-12-1721:00 > learning how and where to find the answers part of the learning process?
Yes. And now you can ask the AI where the docs are.
The struggling is not the goal. And rest assured there are plenty of other things to struggle with.
By PaulKeeble 2025-12-1719:31 The thing is you need both. You need to have periods where you are reading through the docs learning random things and just expanding your knowledge, but the time to do that is not when you are trying to work out how to get a string into the right byte format and saved in the database as a blob (or whatever it is). Documentation has always has lots of different uses and the one that gets you answers to direct questions has improved a bit but its not really reliable yet so you are still going to have to check it.
By fireflash38 2025-12-1722:31 The problem isn't that AI makes obtuse documentation usable. It's that it makes good documentation unread.
There's a lot of good documentation where you learn more about the context of how or why something is done a certain way.
I think if this were true, then individualized mastery learning wouldn't prove to be so effective
By amrocha 2025-12-1720:03 Except none of us have a master teaching and verifying our knowledge on how to use a library. And AI doesn’t do that either.
By throwaway613745 2025-12-1719:00 The best part is when the AI just makes up the docs
It really depends on what's being learned. For example, take writing scripts based on the AWS SDK. The APIs documentation is gigantic (and poorly designed, as it takes ages to load the documentation of each entry), and one uses only a tiny fraction of the APIs. I don't find "learning to find the right APIs" a valuable knowledge; rather, I find "learning to design a (small) program/script starting from a basic example" valuable, since I waste less time in menial tasks (ie. textual search).
By Terr_ 2025-12-1719:01 > It really depends on what's being learned.
Also the difference between using it to find information versus delegating executive-function.
I'm afraid there will be a portion of workers who crutch heavily on "Now what do I do next, Robot Soulmate?"
No :)
Any task has “core difficulty” and “incidental difficulty”. Struggling with docs is incidental difficulty, it’s a tax on energy and focus.
Your argument is an argument against the use of Google or StackOverflow.
By skydhash 2025-12-1719:06 Not really. There’s a pattern to reading docs, just like there’s a pattern to reading code. Once you grasped it, your speed increase a lot. The slowness that junior has is a lack of understanding.
Complaining about docs is like complaining about why research article is not written like elementary school textbooks.
Struggling with poorly organized docs seems entirely like incidental complexity to me. Good learning resources can be both faster and better pedagogically. (How good today's LLM-based chat tools are is a totally separate question.)
By amrocha 2025-12-1720:11 Nobody said anything about poorly organized docs. Reading well structured and organized complex material is immensely difficult. Anyone who’s read Hegel can attest to that.
And yet I wouldn’t trust a single word coming out of the mouth of someone who couldn’t understand Hegel so they read an AI summary instead.
There is value in struggling through difficult things.
By jimbokun 2025-12-1719:00 Why?
If you can just get to the answer immediately, what’s the value of the struggle?
Research isn’t time coding. So it’s not making the developer less familiar with the code base she’s responsible for. Which is the usual worry with AI.
By schainks 2025-12-1719:02 Disagree. While documentation is often out of date, the threshold for maintaining it properly has been lowered, so your team should be doing everything it can to surface effective docs to devs and AIs looking for them. This, in turn, also lowers the barrier to writing good docs since your team's exposure to good docs increases.
If you read great books all the time, you will find yourself more skilled at identifying good versus bad writing.
By jaapbadlands 2025-12-1719:191 reply Feel free to waste your time sifting through a dozen wrong answers. Meanwhile the rest of us can get the answers, absorb the right information quickly then move on to solving more problems.
By bigstrat2003 2025-12-1720:241 reply And you will have learned nothing in the process. Congratulations, you are now behind your peer who "wasted his time" but actually knows stuff which he can lean on in the future.
By twosdai 2025-12-181:07 This is a wrong take. People learn plenty while using AI. it's how you use it that matters. Same issue happened years ago if you just copied stack overflow without understanding what you were doing.
Its no different now, just the level of effort required to get the code copy is lower.
Whenever I use AI I sit and read and understand every line before pushing. Its not hard. I learn more.
By bigstrat2003 2025-12-1720:22 Yes, it is. And yes, it absolutely is harmful.
By tayo42 2025-12-1718:38 If the docs are poorly written then your not learning anything except how to control frustration
By seanmcdirmid 2025-12-1719:063 reply 1965: learning how to punch your own punch cards is part of the learning process
1995: struggling with docs and learning how and where to find the answers part of the learning process
2005: struggling with stackoverflow and learning how to find answers to questions that others have asked before quickly is part of the learning process
2015: using search to find answers is part of the learning process
2025: using AI to get answers is part of the learning process
...
By lifeformed 2025-12-1719:462 reply Has the quality of software been improving all this time?
By seanmcdirmid 2025-12-1721:13 The volume of software that we have produced with new tools has increased dramatically. The quality has remained at a level that the market can accept (and it doesn't want to bother paying for more quality for the cost of it).
By tester756 2025-12-1720:50 Sure, people were writing terrible code 25 years ago
XML oriented programming and other stuff was "invented" back then
This is both anachronistic and wrong.
To the extent that learning to punch your own punch cards was useful, it was because you needed to understand the kinds of failures that would occur if the punch cards weren't punched properly. However, this was never really a big part of programming, and often it was off-loaded to people other than the programmers.
In 1995, most of the struggling with the docs was because the docs were of poor quality. Some people did publish decent documentation, either in books or digitally. The Microsoft KB articles were helpfully available on CD-ROM, for those without an internet connection, and were quite easy to reference.
Stack Overflow did not exist in 2005, and it was very much born from an environment in which search engines were in use. You could swap your 2005 and 2015 entries, and it would be more accurate.
No comment on your 2025 entry.
By seanmcdirmid 2025-12-1720:32 > To the extent that learning to punch your own punch cards was useful, it was because you needed to understand the kinds of failures that would occur if the punch cards weren't punched properly. However, this was never really a big part of programming, and often it was off-loaded to people other than the programmers.
I thought all computer scientists heard about Dijkstra making this claim at one time in their careers. I guess I was wrong? Here is the context:
> A famous computer scientist, Edsger Dijkstra, did complain about interactive terminals, essentially favoring the disciplined approach required by punch cards and batch processing.
> While many programmers embraced the interactivity and immediate feedback of terminals, Dijkstra argued that the "trial and error" approach fostered by interactive systems led to sloppy thinking and poor program design. He believed that the batch processing environment, which necessitated careful, error-free coding before submission, instilled the discipline necessary for writing robust, well-thought-out code.
> "On the Cruelty of Really Teaching Computing Science" (EWD 1036) (1988 lecture/essay)
Seriously, the laments I hear now have been the same in my entire career as a computer scientist. Let's just look toward to 2035 where someone on HN will complain some old way of doing things is better than the new way because its harder and wearing hair shirts is good for building character.
By linksnapzz 2025-12-1719:22 Unironically, yes.
Now get back to work.
For an experienced engineer, working out the syntax, APIs, type issues, understanding errors, etc is the easy part of the job. Larger picture issues are the real task.
But for many Jr engineers it’s the hard part. They are not (yet) expected to be responsible for the larger issues.
what is a larger issue? lacking domain knowledge? or lacking deeper understanding of years of shit in the codebase that seniors may have better understanding? where I work, there is no issue that it "too large" for a junior to take on, it is the only way that "junior" becomes "non-junior" - by doing, not by delegating to so-called seniors (I am one of them)
By dclowd9901 2025-12-1718:171 reply "Larger issue" is overall technical direction and architecture, making decisions that don't paint you into a corner, establishing maintainability as a practice, designing work around an organization's structure and habit and so on.
But these are the things people learn through experience and exposure, and I still think AI can help by at least condensing the numerous books out there around technology leadership into some useful summaries.
Just curious, are you mostly FE? I could see this there (but there is still a lot of browser esoteria, etc)
Doing backend and large distributed systems it (seems to me), much deeper. Types of consistency and their tradeoffs in practice, details like implementing and correctly using lamport clocks, good API design, endless details about reworking, on and on.
And then for both, a learned sense of what approaches to system organization will work in the long run (how to avoid needing to stage a re-write every 5 years).
By ehnto 2025-12-183:36 I still agree more or less that the best way for a junior to succeed is to jump in the deep end, not without guidance though. Mentorship is really important in distributed systems where the inner machinations can be quite obtuse. But I find you can't just explain it all and expect it to stick, mentoring someone through a task is the best way.
By phist_mcgee 2025-12-184:15 >Just curious, are you mostly FE
Gatekeeping?
Why couldn't a backend team have all tasks be junior compatible, if uncoupled from deadlines and time constraints?
You can't give a junior tasks that require experience and nuance that have been acquired over years of development. If you babysit them, then perhaps but then what is the point? By it's nature "nuance" is something hard to describe concretely but as someone who has mentored a fair few juniors most of them don't have it. AI generally doesn't have it either. Juniors need tasks at the boundary of their capability, but not far beyond to be able to progress. Simply allowing them to make a mess of a difficult project is not a good way to get there.
There is such a thing as software engineering skill and it is not domain knowledge, nor knowledge of a specific codebase. It is good taste, an abstract ability to create/identify good solutions to a difficult problem.
By ehnto 2025-12-183:39 > If you babysit them, then perhaps but then what is the point
In a long term enterprise the point is building up a long term skillset into the community. Bolstering your teams hive mind on a smaller scale also.
But work has evolved and the economy has become increasingly hostile to long term building, making it difficult to get buy in for efforts that don't immediately get work done or make money.
By lokar 2025-12-1723:35 Much of the job of the Sr is to understand where the Jr is, and give them tasks that are challenging but achievable, and provide guidance.
you work(ed) in some shitty places if you believe this to be true
Perhaps, I don't consider them shitty myself but palates differ. Is engineering nirvana a place where tasks are such that any can been done by a junior engineer, and the concept of engineering skill developed through experience is non-existent?
By bdangubic 2025-12-182:21 > Is engineering nirvana a place where tasks are such that any can been done by a junior engineer, and the concept of engineering skill developed through experience is non-existent?
how does one junior acquire engineering skills except through experience as you said?
Unnecessary complexity, completely arbitrary one off designs, over emphasis on one part of the behavior while ignoring others. Using design patterns where they shouldn't be used, code once and forget operations exist, using languages and framework that are familiar but unfit for that purpose. The list goes on and I see it happen all the time, AI only makes it worse because it tend to verify all of these with "You're absolutely correct!".
Good luck maintaining that.
By jason_oster 2025-12-1722:461 reply Every team has incompetence at some level. If every team was perfect, there would be no more work left to do, because they would always get the right product built correctly the first time. No bug fix releases, no feature refreshes, no version 2.
Beware, your ego may steer you astray.
By bdangubic 2025-12-182:24 been hacking 31 years with the same ego but you never know. and if I learned anything in these years is to get out the heck out of any place that treats people not by their skills but by how long ago their Mom gave them birth
By butwhyth0oo 2025-12-1718:16 [dead]
By atomicnumber3 2025-12-1720:55 This is honestly what I (staff engineer) find AI the most useful for. I've been around the block enough that I typically know in general what I want, but I often find myself wanting it in a new framework or paradigm or similar, and if I could just ASK a person a question, they'd understand it. But not knowing the exact right keywords, especially in frameworks with lots of jargon, can still make it annoying. I can often get what I want by just sitting down and reading approximately 6 screen-heights of text out of the official docs on the general topic in question to find the random sentence 70% of the way down that answered my question.
But dyou know what's really great at taking a bunch of tokens and then giving me a bunch of probabilistically adjacent tokens? Yeah exactly! So often even if the AI is giving me something totally bonkers semantically, just knowing all those tokens are adjacent enough gives me a big leg up in knowing how to phrase my next question, and of course sometimes the AI is also accidentally semantically correct too.
By never_inline 2025-12-186:59 When I joined I could do all this.
And this is always my question: "... because the genie, used well, accelerates learning." Does it though?
How are we defining "learning" here? The example I like to use is that a student who "learns" what a square root is, can calculate the square root of a number on a simple 4 function calculator (x, ÷, +, -) if iteratively. Whereas the student who "learns" that the √ key gives them the square root, is "stuck" when presented with a 4 function calculator. So did they 'learn' faster when the "genie" surfaced a key that gave them the answer? Or did they just become more dependent on the "genie" to do the work required of them?
Some random musings this reminded me of.
I graduated HS in mid 2000s and didn't start using a calculator for math classes until basically a junior in college. I would do every calculation by hand, on paper. I benefited from a great math teacher early on that taught me how to properly lay out my calculations and solutions on paper. I've had tests I've turned in where I spent more paper on a single question than others did on the entire test.
It really helped my understanding of numbers and how they interacted, and helped teachers/professors narrow down on my misunderstandings.
By jacquesm 2025-12-181:02 Not only that: I suspect you already have an inkling of the range of the expected outcomes for the answer in your head just looking through the problem and any answers that fail that test will cause you to pause to re-check your work.
This aspect is entirely missing when you use an oracle.
You still need to be curious. I learn a ton by asking questions of the LLMs when I see new things. “Explain this to me - I get X but why did you do Y?”
It’s diamond age and a half - you just need to continue to be curious and perhaps slow your shipping speed sometimes to make sure you budget time for learning as well.
By simonw 2025-12-1720:15 I think that's the "used well" in "because the genie, used well, accelerates learning".
By almosthere 2025-12-1717:462 reply We had 3 interns this past summer - with AI I would say they were VERY capable of generating results quickly. Some of the code and assumptions were not great, but it did help us push out some releases quickly to alleviate customer issues. So there is a tradeoff with juniors. May help quickly get features out, may also need some refactoring later.
> Instead of spending three hours figuring out which API to use, they spend twenty minutes evaluating options the AI surfaced
This really isn't the case from what I've seen. It's that they use Cursor or other code generation tools integrated into their development environment to generate code, and if it's functional and looks from a fuzzy distance like 'good' code (in the 'code in the small' sense), they send an oversized PR, and it's up to the reviewer to actually do the thinking.
By rustystump 2025-12-181:12 This. I have seen MRs with generated open cv lut mapping in them because a junior didnt understand that what they needed was a simple interpolation function.
The crux is always that you dont know what u dont know. AI doesnt fix this.
By sharemywin 2025-12-1719:23 I think the big win with AI is being able to work around jargon. Don't know what that word means ask AI. what the history on it no problem. don't understand a concepts explain this at a high school reading level.
By xp84 2025-12-1723:11 > the genie, used well, accelerates learning.
Ehh... 'used well' is doing some very heavy lifting there. And the incentive structure at 90% of companies does not optimize for 'using it well.'
The incentive is to ship quickly, meaning aim the AI-gun at the codebase for a few hours and grind out a "technically working" solution, with zero large-scale architecture thought and zero built-up knowledge of how the different parts of the application are intended to work together (because there was no "intention"). There will be tests, but they may not be sensible and may be very brittle.
Anyway, deploying a bunch of fresh grads armed not with good mentorship but with the ability to generate thousands of LOC a day is a recipe for accelerating the collapse I usually see in startup codebases about 6-8 years old. This is the point where the list of exceptions to every supposed pattern is longer than the list of things that follow the patterns, and where each bug, when properly pursued, leads to a long chain of past bad decisions, each of which would take days of effort to properly unwind (and that unwinding will also have a branching effect on other things). Also, coincidentally, this is the point where an AI agent is the most useless, because they really don't expect all the bizarre quirks in the codebase.
Am I saying AI is useless? No, it's great for prototyping and getting to PMF, and great in the hands of someone who can read its output with a critical eye, but I wouldn't combine it with inexperienced users who haven't had the opportunity to learn from all the many mistakes I've made over the years.
By zahlman 2025-12-180:19 Not to disagree with Kent Beck's insights on juniors using AI, but the effect of AI on his own writing is palpably negative. His older content is much more enjoyable to read. And so is his recent non-post "activity" on Substack. For example, compare a "note" preceding this article (https://substack.com/@kentbeck/note/c-188541464), on the same topic, to the actual content.
By SkyPuncher 2025-12-1718:59 *Some juniors have gotten better.
I hate to be so negative, but one of the biggest problems junior engineers face is that they don't know how to make sense of or prioritize the gluttony of new-to-them information to make decisions. It's not helpful to have an AI reduce the search space because they still can't narrow down the last step effectively (or possibly independently).
There are junior engineers who seem to inherently have this skill. They might still be poor in finding all necessary information, but when they do, they can make the final, critical decision. Now, with AI, they've largely eliminated the search problem so they can focus more on the decision making.
The problem is it's extremely hard to identify who is what type. It's also something that senior level devs have generally figured out.
By GeoAtreides 2025-12-1718:443 reply >but because the genie, used well, accelerates learning.
This is "the kids will use the AI to learn and understand" level of cope
no, the kids will copy and paste the solution then go back to their preferred dopamine dispenser
By CuriouslyC 2025-12-1718:563 reply I've learned a lot of shit while getting AI to give me the answers, because I wanted to understand why it did what it did. It saves me a lot of time trying to fix things that would have never worked, so I can just spend time analyzing success.
There might be value in learning from failure, but my guess is that there's more value in learning from success, and if the LLM doesn't need me to succeed my time is better spent pushing into territory where it fails so I can add real value.
By veunes 2025-12-1810:09 Understanding "why it works" is one thing, understanding "why it should work this way and not another, and what the alternatives are" is entirely different. AI shows you just one of countless correct implementations. You might understand that single implementation, but not the entire theory behind it
By jplusequalt 2025-12-1720:271 reply >I've learned a lot of shit while getting AI to give me the answers
I would argue you're learning less than you might believe. Similarly to how people don't learn math by watching others solve problems, you're not going to learn to become a better engineer/problem solver by reading the output of ChatGPT.
By CuriouslyC 2025-12-1723:10 If I know what I want to do and how I want to do it, and there's plumbing to make that a reality, am I not still solving problems? I'm just paying less attention to stuff that machines can successfully automate.
Regarding leveling up as an engineer, at this point in my career it's called management.
Do you honestly think that’s how people learn?
This is an example of a book on Common Lisp
https://gigamonkeys.com/book/practical-a-simple-database
What you usually do is follow the book instructions and get some result, then go to do some exploration on your own. There’s no walk in the dark trying to figure your own path.
Once you learn what works, and what does not, then you’ll have a solid foundation to tackle more complex subject. That’s the benefit of having a good book and/or a good teacher to guide you to the path of mastering. Using a slot machine is more tortuous than that.
By CuriouslyC 2025-12-1719:201 reply I don't find it to be more torturous than that. In fact, if I were to go back and learn lisp again, I think I'd be a lot more motivated seeing how to build something interesting out of the gate rather than the toy programs I learned in my racket course.
Also, for a lot of things, that is how people learn because there aren't good textbooks available.
By skydhash 2025-12-1719:35 Define interesting.
I was helping a few people on getting started with an Android Development bootcamp and just being able to run the default example and get their bearing around the IDE was interesting to them. And I remember when I was first learning python. Just doing basic variable declaration and arithmetic was interesting. Same with learning C and being able to write tic-tac-toe.
I think a lot of harm is being done by making beginner have expectations that would befit people that have years of experience. Like you can learn docker in 2 months to someone that doesn't even know Linux exists or have never encountered the word POSIX.
Please do read the following article: https://www.norvig.com/21-days.html
By switchbak 2025-12-1720:50 Some might (most might?), those aren't the ones we're interested in.
Just as some might pull the answers from the back of the textbook, the interesting ones are the kids who want to find out why certain solutions are the way they are.
Then again I could be wrong, I try hard to stay away from the shithose that is the modern social media tech landscape (TikTok, Insta, and friends) so I'm probably WAY out of touch (and I prefer it that way).
By simonw 2025-12-1720:16 Right, and they won't get hired beyond their internship.
By ares623 2025-12-1719:37 The cynic in me sees it as using juniors as a vehicle for driving up AI metrics. The seniors will be less critical reviewing AI output with a human shield/messenger.
By alpha_squared 2025-12-1718:14 I kind of agree here. The mental model that works for me is "search results passed through a rock tumbler". Search results without attribution and mixed-and-matched across reputable and non-reputable sources, with a bias toward whatever source type is more common.
By sublinear 2025-12-1717:39 That's arguably all it ever was. Generating content using AI is just finding a point in latent space.
Which was trained on a pre-AI internet. What's going to happen in coming years when new tech comes out but perhaps isn't documented the same way anymore? It's not an unsolvable problem, but we could see unintended consequences like, say where you must pay the AI provider to ingest your data. Similar to buying poll space or AdSense or whatever they call it for search engines
If you release a new piece of technology from 2025 onwards and don't invest a decent amount of effort into producing LLM-friendly documentation (with good examples) that a user can slurp into their coding agent you're doing your new technology a disservice.
By nothrabannosir 2025-12-186:401 reply I thought this was always true? What’s new about documentation being important?
By simonw 2025-12-186:56 If your technology has competition that's already in the training data, the only way to make it equally accessible to LLM users is to ensure there is concise, available documentation that can be fed directly into those LLMs.
That's why "copy page" buttons are increasingly showing on manual pages eg. https://platform.claude.com/docs/en/get-started
first response from me "let me mention how the real business world actually works" .. let's add a more nuanced slice to that however
Since desktop computers became popular, there have been thousands of small to mid-size companies that could benefit from software systems.. A thousand thousand "consultants" marched off to their nearest accountant, retailer, small manufacturer or attorney office, to show off the new desktop software and claim ability to make new, custom solutions.
We know now, this did not work out for a lot of small to mid-size business and/or consultants. Few could build a custom database application that is "good enough" .. not for lack of trying.. but pace of platforms, competitive features, stupid attention getting features.. all of that, outpaced small consultants .. the result is giant consolidation of basic Office software, not thousands of small systems custom built for small companies.
What now, in 2025? "junior" devs do what? design and build? no. Cookie-cutter procedures at AWS lock-in services far, far outpace small and interesting designs of software.. Automation of AWS actions is going to be very much in demand.. is that a "junior dev" ? or what?
This is a niche insight and not claiming to be the whole story.. but.. ps- insert your own story with "phones" instead of desktop software for another angle
One thing I'd point out is that there are only so many ways to write a document or build a spreadsheet. There are a ton of business processes that are custom enough to that org that they have to decide to go custom, change their process, or deal with the inefficiency of not having a technical solution that accomplishes the goal easily.
Lotus Notes is an example of that custom software niche that took off and spawned a successful consulting ecosystem around it too.
By dylan604 2025-12-1718:19 > Lotus Notes is an example
TIL Notes is still a thing. I had thought it was dead and gone some time ago.
I'm a little confused by this analysis. Are you saying that all enterprise software has been replaced with MS word and AWS?
By gnerd00 2025-12-1718:20 certainly no -- not "all software" of anything. Where is the word "enterprise" in the post you have replied to ? "enterprise" means the very largest companies and institutions..
I did not write "all software" or "enterprise software" but you are surprised I said that... hmmm
I'm not swayed by appeals to authority, but this is a supremely bad take.
"AI" tools are most useful in the hands of experienced developers, not juniors. It's seniors who have the knowledge and capability to review the generated output, and decide whether the code will cause more issues when it's merged, or if it's usable if they tweak and adapt it in certain ways.
A junior developer has no such skills. Their only approach will be to run the code, test whether it fulfills the requirements, and, if they're thorough, try to understand and test it to the best of their abilities. Chances are that because they're pressured to deliver as quickly as possible to impress their colleagues and managers, they'll just accept whatever working solution the tool produces the first time.
This makes "AI" in the hands of junior developers risky and counterproductive. Companies that allow this type of development will quickly grind to a halt under the weight of technical debt, and a minefield of bugs they won't know how to maneuver around.
The unfortunate reality is that with "AI" there is no pathway for junior developers to become senior. Most people will gravitate towards using these tools as a crutch for quickly generating software, and not as a learning tool to improve their own skills. This should concern everyone vested in the future of this industry.
By versteegen 2025-12-186:351 reply > A junior developer has no such skills. Their only approach will be to run the code, test whether it fulfills the requirements, and, if they're thorough, try to understand and test it to the best of their abilities.
This is also a supremely bad take... well, really it's mainly the way you worded it that's bad. Juniors have skills, natural aptitudes, as much intelligence on average as other programmers, and often even some experience but what they lack is work history. They sure as hell are capable of understanding code rather than just running it. Yes, of course experience is immensely useful, most especially at understanding how to achieve a maintainable and reliable codebase in the longterm, which is obviously of special importance, but long experience is not a hard requirement. You can reason about trade offs, learn from advice, learn quickly, etc.
By imiric 2025-12-188:12 You're right, that was harshly worded. I meant to contrast it with the capability of making a quality assessment of the generated output, and understanding how and what to change, if necessary. This is something that only experts in any field are capable of. I didn't mean to imply that people lacking experience are incapable of attaining these skills, let alone that they're less intelligent. It's just that the field is positioned against them in a way that they might never reach this level. Some will, but it will be much harder for most. This wouldn't be an issue if these new tools were infallible, but we're far from that stage.
I disagree. In my experience AI does most of the work and the juniors already poor skills atrophy. Then a senior engineer has to review AI slop and tell the junior to roll the AI dice again.
By snarf21 2025-12-1721:24 Agreed, this is like AI doing your homework. A select few will use it to learn but most will copy/pasta, let it create their PR and slack the rest of the day. But at least they are "trying" so they won't get fired. And it requires strong senior engineers to walk them through the changes they are trying to check in and see why they chose them.
By Yodel0914 2025-12-1721:34 I’m so sick of getting “but copilot said…” responses on PR comments.
By thinkingtoilet 2025-12-1722:261 reply I've seen it go both ways. As usual, a good manager should be able to navigate this.
By amrocha 2025-12-189:02 Ok, but not all managers are good and not all situations are navigable.
By ivape 2025-12-1718:18 Don’t confuse this with this persons ability to hide their instincts. He is redefining “senior” roles as junior, but words are meaningless in a world of numbers. The $$$ translation is that something that was worth $2 should now be worth $1.
Because that makes the most business sense.
By irishcoffee 2025-12-1719:09 The amount of copium in the replies to this is just amazing. It’s amazing.
How would a person who describes himself as a "full time content producer" know what is actually going on in the industry?
https://substack.com/@kentbeck
What software projects is he actively working on?
By helsinkiandrew 2025-12-1717:463 reply By dlisboa 2025-12-1718:00 To be fair, even if I appreciate Beck, some people do get too famous and start to inhabit a space that is far removed from the average company. Many of these guys tend to give out advice that is applicable to a handful of top earning companies but not the rest.
By umanwizard 2025-12-1718:26 Doesn't this back up the point? From his wiki it seems like he is mostly famous as a programming influencer, not as a programmer.
So? His bio is literally one latest fad after the other. Now he joins the "AI" fad, what a surprise.
That is a very cynical take which completely ignores his contributions through the decades.
In many cases he helped build the bandwagons you're implying he simply jumped onto.
By exasperaited 2025-12-1718:23 > In many cases he helped build the bandwagons you're implying he simply jumped onto.
The fact that I cannot tell if you mean this satirically or not (though I want to believe you do!) is alarming to me.
The dude literally invented Extreme Programming and was the first signer of the Agile Manifesto. He's forgotten more about software development than most people on this site ever knew.
By bigfishrunning 2025-12-1721:45 Seems to me that his core competency is in managing a software team, not developing software.
Someone's accomplishments don't make them incapable of having bad opinions and being wrong. Cults of personality are harmful to progress. Opinions should hold the same weight and be held to the same scrutiny regardless of who voiced them.
That wasn't the question being asked. The question being asked was literally "what are this guy's accomplishments," and Kent Beck is a tech industry OG with a laundry list of them.
Of course he can be wrong; he's human. That wasn't my point.
When you're so out of touch as to not know who Kent Beck is, these questions hardly matter.
The thrust of the issue is that: when used suitably, AI tools can increase the rate of learning such that it changes the economics of investments in juniour developers - in a good way, to the contrary of how these tools have been discussed in the mainstream. That is an interesting take, and worthy of discussion.
Your appeal to authority here is out of place here and clearly uninformed, thus the downvotes.
By bgwalter 2025-12-1721:14 I know who Kent Beck is and I'm not impressed by Agile and Extreme Programming.
What I did not know and what the Wikipedia page revealed is that he worked for a YCombinator company. Thus the downvotes.
By orliesaurus 2025-12-1717:3810 reply Interesting take... I'm seeing a pattern... People think AI can do it all... BUT I see juniors often are the ones who actually understand AI tools better than seniors... That's what AWS CEO points out... He said juniors are usually the most experienced with AI tools, so cutting them makes no sense... He also mentioned they are usually the least expensive, so there's little cost saving... AND he warned that without a talent pipeline you break the future of your org... As someone who mentors juniors, I've seen them use AI to accelerate their learning... They ask the right questions, iterate quickly, and share what they find with the rest of us... Seniors rely on old workflows and sometimes struggle to adopt new tools... HOWEVER the AI isn't writing your culture or understanding your product context... You still need people who grow into that... So I'm not worried about AI replacing juniors... I'm more worried about companies killing their own future talent pipeline... Let the genies help, but don't throw away your apprentices.
By orliesaurus 2025-12-1717:403 reply ON TOP OF IT ALL, juniors are the ones who bring novel tools to the desk MOST times...i.e. I had no clue the Google IDE gave you free unlimited credits despite the terrible UI...but a young engineer told me about it!!
I've seen seniors and juniors bring novel tools in. Seniors do it less often perhaps - but only because we have seen this before under a different name and realize it isn't novel. (sometimes the time has finally come, sometimes it fail again for the same reason it failed last time)
By JKCalhoun 2025-12-1719:15 I've seen seniors bring up novel ideas to juniors—well, novel to the juniors anyway.
Just an example. I've been in so many code bases over the years… I had a newer engineer come aboard who, when he saw some code I recently wrote with labels (!) he kind of blanched. He thought "goto == BAD". (We're talking "C" here.)
But this was code that dealt with Apple's CoreFoundation. More or less every call to CF can fail (which means returning NULL in the CF API). And (relevant) passing NULL to a CF call, like when trying to append a CF object to a CF array, was a hard crash. CF does no param checking. (Why, that would slow it down—you, dear reader, are to do all the sanity checking.)
So you might have code similar to:
CFDictionary dict = NULL;
dict = CFCreateDictionary();
if (!dict)
You would likely continue to create arrays, etc—insert them into your dictionary, maybe return the dictionary at the end. And again, you checked for NULL at every call to CF, goto bail if needed.goto bail;Down past 'bail' you could CFRelease() all the non-null instances that you do not return. This was how we collected our own garbage. :-)
In any event, goto labels made the code cleaner: your NULL-checking if-statements did not have to nest crazy deep.
The new engineer admitted surprise that there might be a place for labels. (Or, you know, CF could have been more NULL-tolerant and simply exited gracefully.)
By al_borland 2025-12-181:07 I work at a place with lots of rules around what can and can’t be used. When someone new start we end up spending a lot of time policing to make sure they aren’t using stuff they should be.
A very basic example were the interns who constantly tried to use Google Docs for everything, their personal accounts no less. I had to stop them and point them back to MS Office at least a dozen times.
In other situations, people will try and use free tools that don’t scale well, because that’s what they used in college or as a hobby. It can take a lot of work to point them to the enterprise solution that is already approved and integrated with everything. A basic example of this would be someone using Ansible from their laptop when we have Ansible Automation Platform, which is better optimized for running jobs around the globe and automatically logs to Splunk to create an audit trail.
I'm just shocked people aren't clueing into the fact that tech companies are trying to build developer dependence on these things to secure a "rent" revenue stream. But hey, what do I know. It's just cloud hyper scaling all over again. Don't buy and drive your own hardware. Rent ours! Look, we built the metering and everything!
By SketchySeaBeast 2025-12-1718:59 I'd hope people are. It's painfully obvious this entire AI push is rent-seeking half hidden by big tech money. At some point the free money is going to go away, but the rent for every service will remain.
By positr0n 2025-12-1720:04 I'm clued in to that but at this point who cares. All the models are fungible for the coding assistance use case.
By orliesaurus 2025-12-1720:311 reply you will be able to run code assistants on your own machine soon, just like how you can run intense graphical simulations (videogames?) thanks to GPUs
By agoodusername63 2025-12-1720:37 idk about that with the rising cost of hardware. But I guess if your IT dept is doing the purchasing thats not really your problem.
"BUT I see juniors often are the ones who actually understand AI tools better than seniors"
Sorry, what does that mean exactly ? Are you claiming that a junior dev knows how to ask the right prompts better than a Senior dev ?
Their implication is that junior devs have more likely built up their workflow around the use of AI tooling, likely because if they're younger they'll have had more plasticity in their process to adapt AI tooling
Overall I don't quite agree. Personally this applies to me, I've been using vim for the last decade so any AI tooling that wants me to run some electron app is a non starter. But many of my senior peers coming from VS Code have no such barriers
Speaking of vim - adding and configuring copilot plugin for vim is easy (it runs a nodejs app in the background but if you have spare 500 Mb RAM it's invisible).
By YetAnotherNick 2025-12-1718:52 Copilot in vim is not the same as cursor. e.g. There is no multiline tab autocomplete.
By sailfast 2025-12-1719:54 All the major players offer a CLI, for what it’s worth.
You won’t need Vim except to review changes and tweak some things if you feel like it.
By francisofascii 2025-12-1719:47 Speaking as a senior dev, anecdotally juniors may indeed understand AI tools better, because they spend more hours a day coding and working with the tools, and they need the tools to understand the codebase or to be productive. Seniors have more hours stuck in meetings, developing specs/tickets for the juniors, code reviewing, etc. Seniors are likely to not bother with a prompt for simple changes in codebases they already understand.
By perfmode 2025-12-1718:41 Some old dogs resist learning new tricks.
By bongodongobob 2025-12-1719:13 If AI is just prompts to you, you fall into the "don't know how to use it" group.
By whazor 2025-12-1717:54 Amazon has an internal platform for building software. The workflows are documented and have checks and balances. So the CEO wants to have more junior developer that are more proficient with AI, and have (in ratio) less senior developers. Also, product context comes from (product) managers, UX designers.
For medium or small companies, these guardrails or documentation can be missing. In that case you need experienced people to help out.
By WestCoader 2025-12-1717:444 reply Sorry but what the heck is up with all the ellipses in this comment?
By Mountain_Skies 2025-12-1718:30 It's a sort of stream of consciousness. That style of writing goes in and out of style from time to time but some people use it consistently.
By raincole 2025-12-1718:18 They have an emacs package that triples their . automatically!
By butwhyth0oo 2025-12-1718:00 [dead]
They're trying really hard to make sure you know they didn't write their post with an LLM? /s
By red-iron-pine 2025-12-1717:491 reply honestly i think that'll be a thing in the future
"bespoke, hand generated content straight to your best readers"
By DiscourseFan 2025-12-1718:09 Nah, models can be fine tuned and trained on anything. Common consumer products like ChatGPT and Gemini have particular styles, very polite and helpful, but there are models trained to be combatative, models trained to write in the style of shakespeare, all sorts of things. Someone could train a model to reply to posts in the style of HN comments and you’d probably never know.
> I'm seeing a pattern...
Me too. Fire your senior devs. (Ha ha, not ha ha.)
By Ancalagon 2025-12-1719:02 No no, fire them.
Cannot wait for the 'Oh dear god everything is on fire, where is the senior dev?' return pay packages.
By ch2026 2025-12-1717:46 is this just a janky summary cause you added zero new viewpoints
> He said juniors are usually the most experienced with AI tools, so cutting them makes no sense.
While anyone is free to define words as they so please, most people consider those with the most experience to be seniors. I am pretty sure that has been the message around this all along: Do not cut the seniors. The label you choose isn't significant. Whether you want to call them juniors or seniors, it has always been considered to make no sense to cut those with the most experience.
By dragonwriter 2025-12-1722:481 reply No, he’s saying that juniors, while having less experience ind development in general have more experience with AI tools. (This may be true broadly, certainly less experienced devs generally, IME, seem more enthusiastic about adopting and relying heavily on AI tooling.)
While, again, anyone can define words as they see fit, most people consider the "junior" and "senior" labels to apply to the activity being conducted, not something off to the side. As the job is to use AI tools, these most experienced people would be considered "seniors" by most. Nobody was ever suggesting that you should cut good help because they're juniors in knitting or dirt biking.
By dragonwriter 2025-12-1723:101 reply No, the job is to develop software. Using AI tools is one piece of the job. Having less experience with the job overall and more experience with one piece is a thing that happens.
By 9rx 2025-12-181:01 The job is never to develop software. The job is always to solve problems for customers. Developing software is just a tool in the toolbox. As is, increasingly, using AI. As such, it is valuable to have those who are experienced in using AI on staff.
Which is nothing new. It has always been understood that it is valuable to have experienced people on board. The "cut the juniors" talk has never been about letting those who offer value go. Trying to frame it as being about those who offer experiential value — just not in the places you've arbitrary chosen — is absurd.
By zahlman 2025-12-180:47 > As the job is to use AI tools
Aside from the absurdity of this claim, consider how many years of experience a "senior" is typically expected to have, and then consider how long even ChatGPT has been available to the public, never mind SOTA coding agents.
7/10 senior devs (usually fellas 50+) will get mad at you for trying to use Claude Code. Me: “dude it writes better code than crap you write in your mush middle-age brain.” Also me: “I also have mush brain.”
I think LLM is a reflection of human intelligence. If we humans become dumber as a result of LLM, LLMs will also become dumber. I’d like to think in some dystopian world, LLM’s trained from pre 2023 data will be sought after.
By thunky 2025-12-182:32 > 7/10 senior devs (usually fellas 50+) will get mad at you for trying to use Claude Code
Ironic because the junior has much more to lose. The 50+ can probably coast across the finish line.
By yieldcrv 2025-12-1718:19 you're right but my opinion about this has changed
I would have agreed with you 100% one year ago. Basically senior engineers are too complacent to look at AI tools as well as ego driven about it, all while corporate policy disincentivizes them from using anything at all, with maybe a forced Co-Pilot subscription. While junior engineers will take a risk that the corporate monitoring of cloud AI tools isn't that robust.
But now, although many of those organizations are still the same - with more contrived Co-Pilot subscriptions - I think senior engineers are skirting corporate policy too and become more familiar with tools.
I'm also currently in an organization that is a total free for all with as many AI coding and usage tools as necessary to deliver faster. So I could be out of touch already.
Perhaps more complacent firms are the same as they were a year ago.
By kakacik 2025-12-1718:33 Maybe, but you make it sound like juniors are more worthy to companies than seniors. Then fire most/all seniors and good luck with resulting situation.
Coding in any sufficiently large organization is never the main part of senior's time spend, unless its some code sweatshop. Juniors can do little to no of all that remaining glue that makes projects go from a quick brainstorming meeting to live well functioning and supported product.
So as for worth - companies can, in non-idedal fashion obviously, work without juniors. I can't imagine them working without seniors, unless its some sort of quick churn of CRUDs or eshops from some templates.
Also there is this little topic that resonates recently across various research - knowledge gained fast via llms is a shallow one, doesn't last that long and doesn't go deeper. One example out of many - any time I had to do some more sophisticated regex-based processing I dived deep into specs, implementation etc. and few times pushed it to the limits (or realized task is beyond what regex can do), instead of just given the result, copypasted it and moved along since some basic test succeeded. Spread this approach across many other complex topics. That's also a view on long term future of companies.
I get what you say and I agree partially but its a double edged sword.
