The Death of the Junior Developer – Steve Yegge
sourcegraph.comThe author observes that AI is replacing junior developers/lawyers/other knowledge workers while at the same time producing output that can only be safely wielded by senior developers/lawyers/etc, leading to a future where there is no longer a path towards developing those senior skills.
Yegge has written many other essays I've found deeply interesting. He now works a company that makes an AI coding assistant and wrote this post on the company's site. He flirts with the question of whether he might be one of the baddies - he even frames his essay using a series of horror movie titles - but then shies away from the implications and advocates for his product.
> leading to a future where there is no longer a path towards developing those senior skills.
That sounds like unintentional death spiral for a company. You don't have juniors, it is hard to get seniors, because nobody is training juniors. So when all the seniors eventually leave, company is left with tech stack which nobody understands and few people hired for maintenance are only able to perform specific rituals left from previous generation. This might work for a while due to momentum but after some time it will just implode under its own tech debt and one unexpected push - like nobody is making servers which our tech stack runs on a we need to migrate...