the juniors who only learned to code with AI are going to have a rough time in about 5 years

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Individual-Bench4448@reddit

This is the most honest version of the concern I've seen put into words. And the detail about the junior pasting their own code back into Claude to ask what it does, that's not a laziness problem, that's a mental model problem. They never built one.

The thing that actually worries me more than year 5, though, is year 2. by year 5, you at least know you're in trouble. The dangerous period is earlier, when they're shipping confidently, PRs are passing review, nothing is obviously broken, and the gaps are invisible. The system map they never built doesn't announce itself missing until something falls over sideways at 2 am.

What I've seen work on teams where this is a real concern: making spec-writing a non-negotiable step before any agent runs. not a prompt, an actual written description of what the output must not do, what failure looks like, what the acceptance criteria are. It's slower at the start but it forces the mental model to exist outside the agent. The junior who writes that spec is actually learning the system. The one who doesn't is just approving outputs.

I'd guess that most who are hostile about opposition to H1-B have either themselves benefitted from its legitimate use, or are being ethnocentric, that is, they believe in the inherent superiority of their own ethnic group or culture. In this subreddit, I suspect there are many South Asians who fit into the latter category, and some of them are quite vocal about it.

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Important_Coffee_845@reddit

im not even against the asians doing this per se... actually I get why THEY would take advantage. its this whole naive "ally" culture and corporate "woke" DEI nonsense that bothers me. I really don't care about race or nationality personally but u can't help but see patterns
but funny enough its usually upper middle class whites that get angry with me, virtue signaling, all that 2010s nonsense. We know. And we're tired of it. They can say what they want, ive seen what they upvote.

The nose rings, the finger wagging, the "you're just a racist WAH! validate my life experience and my pronouns now WAH!" It gets old...

But I agree with you. you do see that ethnocentricity take enter stage then ur beaten over the head with it as they project their nastiness onto well... the rest of us.

but ya know "we are the problem" 😉
I'm just not playing the game anymore.

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Relative_Bird484@reddit

Point is, it will be other executives by then 😊

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Dramatic_Win424@reddit

I wonder how this will pan out in the future. Nobody in a deciding role can tell anyone's real skill level during the hiring step anymore because AI tools can hide the true knowledge and skill level to an astonishing degree. It might destroy trust in all known indicators.

We might move onto word of mouth exclusively because there isn't any other way to know.

Do we have any comparable industry where hiring practices changed like that?

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Humble_Warthog9711@reddit

Let's be honest - the industry for the most part has always upheld that the code people claim as their own is a beyond awful indicator of their actual knowledge/proficiency.

It's why the fuss around here about personal projects is wayyyy overblown, though I don't think people here want to hear it.

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shure_slo@reddit

It's insane that people expect personal projects to make up for years of production level experience. If I have 10+ years in high profile company what does it matter if I do not have projects in my personal Github???

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Humble_Warthog9711@reddit

I think it's spoken of here as the way to make up for a lack of degree/internships for self taught devs and bootcampers mostly.

But anyone that has worked in tech knows that when peoples livelihoods are at stake, cheating becomes the norm.

No one is going to look at a juniors personal projects unless they were being hired already

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ImportantMud9749@reddit

I like seeing applicants with home projects. If anything, it sets them apart from those that don't. Lately that's been important because the market is flooded with applicants.

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DigmonsDrill@reddit

It may just be that they give up on having any seniors and most development and maintenance is done by people prompting AI.

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InVultusSolis@reddit

That's when my old, experienced ass can come in and fix all of the vibe coded slop for $1000/hr as a consultant.

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ItsAlways_DNS@reddit

There might be so many other old consultants that you might not even be able to get $400 an hour lol.

It’s going to be a blood bath.

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InVultusSolis@reddit

You're assuming there's going to be enough to go around, which I guarantee you there will not be.

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ItsAlways_DNS@reddit

Nobody can predict the future mate

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DigmonsDrill@reddit

Unless the whole thing is vibe-coded, which means you can't just fix the project by editing the right file.

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InVultusSolis@reddit

Sure you can. If the business depends on it, you can give them an honest assessment of how long it will take and they can either pay it, or not.

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Geno0wl@reddit

I wonder how this will pan out in the future.

InVultusSolis@reddit

I would be happy with that. I can't stand the 3+ rounds of interviews that are basically just a byzantine set of hurdles to jump over.

If I were tasked with hiring a junior, I'd bring him/her in and simply sit next to them and work on a problem. I'd create a mock systems design exercise meant to test knowledge all the way from basic coding up to knowing how systems interact. The only thing I would disallow is "write the code for me" sorts of AI usage.

I know that sort of thing isn't always possible with remote positions, however.

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PartBanyanTree@reddit

I wish we could somehow work in a reputation based mentor/apprenticeship style situation where it is all about who you know.

I realize this will lead to horrible inequalities and be rampant with abuse and worse. I get that it's a terrible idea

but also I wish I could work with people who I trust, help people I know are good, and that trash devs could be ostracized instead of promoted. combined with some type of union so that management is forced to respect people

but y'know somehow it's a good union and only helps people and isn't bad. and that somehow all the programmers who can't even agree on what to name a variable will somehow run things properly and fairly in a way that only has benefits and no drawbacks

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Kane_ASAX@reddit

Yeah nah. This is science fiction.

First company I worked for. My boss was my best friend's dad. Repeatedly delayed my paycheck by 1-2 weeks every time. Never again. I do not want to work for "someone I know".

You can build that trust with strangers. It can be done, and that is exactly what I've done after the first shithole.

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Important_Coffee_845@reddit

Ew... I wanna get away from "who you know" as much as possible. Forget that.

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need-original-name@reddit

I will probably hearing that some anime artists have started requiring that their job applicants draw in front of them.

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Frolo_NA@reddit

its been trending that way already

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TheRealKidkudi@reddit

It’s always been that way for any technical role, including the world outside of programming. Where do you think leetcode-style interview challenges came from?

The phenomenon of a generally incompetent or incapable coworker is nearly universal. The problem is exacerbated by the fact that programming is basically magic to non-programmers, but most jobs face the same problem that it is hard to accurately assess someone’s skill level without 1) having that skill yourself and/or 2) actually seeing them practice that skill.

If it takes 5 years for many company to feel the impact, then it will be around 2030, but how have AI coding tools advanced by then?

madrury83@reddit

Centuries of education support the thesis that you cannot accurately judge the correctness of technical work you never learned, through practice, to produce. There is no magic spell here, LLM use almost definitionally weakens someone's ability to assess correctness.

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future_traveller@reddit

I don't even need to program to judge if the programming work done met the outcome I needed. And I can have an agent scan the code for meeting of standards compliance,functionality, and security vulnerabilities.

I really just need a junior product manager to say this functions well and how I want it.

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Pantzzzzless@reddit

Sure, if you want to happy path everything.

What happens when the size of your dependency tree grows beyond that of a grad project? Try getting Opus to accurately grasp how a system works when there are 5 layers of downstream calls. Half of which have no documentation at all.

And I can have an agent scan the code for meeting of standards compliance,functionality, and security vulnerabilities.

Lol, ok. Sure, it will spit out a nicely formatted table with green checkboxes telling you "This is a very clean implementation!". But that pat on the back won't help much when half of your services are closing circuit breakers because your agent didn't think to do any load testing.

I really just need a junior product manager to say this functions well and how I want it.

If your measure of success is "functions well", then I truly feel bad for anyone that has to come behind you to clean your messes up.

A "junior product manager" is not gonna have any idea how to test edge cases.

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future_traveller@reddit

As opposed to a junior engineer who is definitely going to produce high quality code, scale everything out correctly in complex scenarios and understands the whole app and code base? Reality is when you hire a junior engineer the quality you get isn't great at first. It requires solid process with checks and balances.

I'm suggesting you build the checks and balances into your AI devops workflow for things like writing test cases, executing them etc. the jr product manager doesn't need to be worried about the code they just need to worry about clearly defining outcomes and validating those outcomes.

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glotzerhotze@reddit

You have no clue what you are talking about. Absolutely no clue, like most of the code I get handed by LLMan juniors. Looks like „the shit“, and works very shitty, too.

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nachoaverageplayer@reddit

IT is not programming.

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future_traveller@reddit

Correct programming is one very specific small part of the it world.

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AUTeach@reddit

The world is large.

In Australia for example, IT is descriptive of systems/network and software. It's so entrenched that my university rebadged their computer science degree as information technology only offering CS to international students.

Also, wouldn't it be a bad recommendation for the next generation? Systems/networks are getting more and more code friendly with how you configure remote and cloud computing.

I know a lot of my systems administration time less about smashing commands and more about writing ansible plays and often scripts to patch stuff together.

I'd hate to be a junior systems/network administrator/engineer and not have a solid foundation in scripting.

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OrphicDionysus@reddit

This has been a growing problem across a lot of industries for decades now. Larger businesses had depended on smaller competitors to train their workforces, poaching them once they had some experience as a way to offload the costs of training onto companies that didn't have the hiring networks or prestige to do the same thing. Then through the post-antitrust era they are those competitors through unchecked consolidation until the only participants left in their markers were the other players large enough to have altered their hiring pipelines to work in the same ways.

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Individual-Shame6481@reddit

From The Hundred Acre Wood?

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farfromelite@reddit

where senior developers come from.

They come from LinkedIn, duh

/s

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BroaxXx@reddit

Do you know who won’t have a hard time? Everyone that can work without an LLM… I can already feel the salary bump and job security in a couple of years…

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simonbleu@reddit

Yup

I think that if it gets bad enough, what will grow the most are companies middlemanning contractors, and companies that train andor test employees doe you under synthetic scenarios. Likely the same companies

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urbanhawk1@reddit

When a mommy developer and a daddy developer love each other very much...

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tripleshielded@reddit

Mars ofc

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National-Medicine570@reddit

the thing is, ai-assisted learning creates a very specific knowledge gap — you know what to type but not why it works. eventually you'll hit a bug that nobody on the internet has written about yet and that's where the real learning starts whether you like it or not

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Mesmoiron@reddit

I am a non tech leader with a group of students who volunteer on real projects.

I select on students who are willing to program. Still they argue to use AI, but I am wary. They must annotate their code .

Until now it goes well. The PR, I had to learn how to do it. I use 3 AIs for assistance. Ask what I don't understand. But I have a six sence for BS and so catch trouble early on. The first thing I wrote was how they can work with it and the code must have a special header.

But, I also see pride when they ask me to review; the questions are well structured with some and detailed in why and how. This signals someone who takes his/her work seriously.

Now, I am thinking about creating a real upskilling project out of it. One of the challenges is to cut the issues into beginner to advanced. This whole experiment gave me so many interesting insights.

AI is not going away; but it will shift the burden to people who might not be good developers; but are good in anticipation and thinking holistic. Because, why not still matters.

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Terrible-Ad-6794@reddit

You still need to know what you're doing with AI. Moreso than ever now that product expectations have shifted. Not sure about the 5 year take though, I'm seeing JDs learning, but I different ways...they see code patterns, but won't learn much depth that's true...but they are learning what to watch out for mistake patterns. To me, it's not really all that different from typical bugs, just QA has to be more mindful in SUT. Whether that's gloom and doom remains to be seen.

Because the whole part about JDs in 5 years is plausible but only half the story to me. My real concern is what happens in 5 years when AI generation creates working stacks even the most Senior Devs have difficulty understanding?

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AdventurousLime309@reddit

The dangerous part isn’t using AI, it’s skipping the debugging struggle entirely. A huge amount of engineering intuition comes from tracing failures, reading ugly logs, isolating edge cases, and slowly building mental models of systems.

AI compresses implementation time, but it can also compress learning if people never pause to understand what shipped. The juniors who stay curious and investigate beneath the generated code will probably do great. The ones who only prompt-and-merge might hit a wall later.

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Big-Lawfulness-1441@reddit

Not to sound like an asshole, but I believe it should be the senior's Duty nowadays to EXPLAIN, Instead of complaining, you should be explaining to the juniors about X, Y, and Z. This hot take: I get it, AI is trash, but this isn't helpful for the juniors!

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Complete_Pool2717@reddit

The answer isn't 'ban Claude.' It's treating it like a calculator vs outsourcing your math brain. Juniors should use it to ship faster, but code review needs to ask 'explain this to me' instead of just approving

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Antique_Prune_4869@reddit

bruh pasting their own merged code into claude like 'what does this do' is absolutely wild. thats not an ai thing thats a reading comprehension thing lmao

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There are so many unknowns here that it's really hard to imagine what the future looks like.

Maybe tokens get so expensive that businesses pivot back to normal hiring and just pay for tokens for augmenting certain tasks.

Maybe tokens continue to get cheaper and eventually everyone is let go because all you need is one knowledgeable person and an army of agents.

Maybe it ends up where there is so much new work to do that even with cheap tokens businesses keep hiring because each engineer gets more productivity for the same or similar spend.

If we truly enter a scenario where no one is hiring juniors for multiple years, that means the AI is good enough to actually replace them, and will likely augment seniors in dealing with whatever problems arise. Agentic tools are, so far, constantly improving, so maybe 5 years from now the agents aren't making many of the same mistakes and we just don't have that much slop to deal with.

Who knows what will happen. I definitely don't.

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KaleidoscopeThis5159@reddit

It's amazing how they get hired but i can't even get a screening interview with a recruiter

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yaycupcake@reddit

I'm more frustrated that I can't get my resume through ATS despite 20 years of coding experience, but people who literally don't know how the code they ship works are able to find work writing code.

BizAlly@reddit

They’re not doomed but they will struggle later if they never build the mental model muscle. AI speeds up shipping; it doesn’t replace understanding.

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NicksTechTricks@reddit

Today is the dumbest the model will ever be. In 5 years, at the current pace, there will be no errors. Context windows will be what 10M? 100M? Coding will be solved.

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Ok_Replacement2229@reddit

You are acting like AI development is just going to freeze where it is today. In five years, that 2 AM prod bug will be found and patched by an AI before the junior even wakes up. We really need to stop romanticizing the struggle of banging our heads against a wall for hours. The main skill is no longer memorizing syntax. It is directing the AI that writes it. Honestly, this sounds exactly like senior devs in the 80s complaining when people stopped writing Assembly and started using compilers. Were they also asking what happens when the compiler fails and the new kids do not have the muscle memory to read binary under pressure?

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Aleks_Zemz_1111@reddit

The problem isn't using AI, it's the Loss of the Mental Map.

I run industrial machinery where 'confidently wrong' results in a six figure repair bill. Watching a junior paste their own code back into Claude to ask: what does this do? Is like a mechanic not knowing which way to turn a wrench.

When you spend hours sitting with broken code, you aren't wasting time, you're hard coding the system's logic into your own brain. If you skip that friction, you never build the muscle memory required to debug at 2 am when the AI is hallucinating, and production is down.

These juniors are becoming Operators of an Oracle, not Engineers. They can ship features fast when the path is clear, but they are blind the moment they hit uncharted territory.

In 5 years, we're going to have a surplus of "Prompt Operators" and a shortage of people who actually understand how the machine works. Never merge a line of code you couldn't explain if the power went out.

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cynicalmuddle@reddit

Day after day, it gets worse. Senior managers using AI to run "analysis" on big data sets to solve issues. Never mind those datasets are dirty as they come and their AI comes up with the most bullshit hypothesis to account for the errors, so business decisions being based on fairy tales. BI analysts who have pushed into using the various AI agents to speed things up, pushing reports with the same dirty data and having not done the hard yards to know the output is clean, shiney and a turd. If your a subject expert, AI is amazing, speeds up all the tedious stuff. No idea how you get to be a subject expert in the coming years.

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Aleks_Zemz_1111@reddit

That 'shiny turd' is the inevitable result of treating AI as an Oracle instead of a tool.

In my factory, if I feed a machine dirty stock, I don't get a product, I get a jammed press and a repair bill. Management thinks AI is a shortcut around the hard yards, but it's really just a short position on quality.

The only way to stay a subject expert now is to build a personal Knowledge CI/CD. You don't just 'do' the work, you have to architect a way to capture the logic that AI scrapers miss. If you don't own the underlying architecture of your own insights, you're just a component in a depreciating system. I've been refactoring my own 20 years of technical 'scars' into a framework for this exact reason, because the 'turd' is only going to get shinier in 2026.

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Hot_Promotion8498@reddit

Building your own knowledge CI/CD is solid if you've got 20 years to refactor, but most people need something running now. I've been dumping my scraps into Reseek and letting it handle the tagging and search so I can actually use the stuff instead of just architecting around it.

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deleted_by_reddit@reddit

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Gokul123654@reddit

bro i am waiting for it so that they will pay us a premium heee

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springhilleyeball@reddit

i learned how to code without AI but i am only regressing at my first swe job. i won't last much longer & i know it with the shoving of AI down our throats

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Kane_ASAX@reddit

Same here. At my first job I was working with c++ builder stuff and at some point creating the website for some inverters(C rest api + vue). I did use chatgpt back then just to get used to the codebase etc, but after like a week I could confidently code on my own. Moved to another job cause first place was shit.

They wanted me on cursor and I did as such, but damn, my coding skills degraded significantly. I am now basically telling cursor to write like 80% of the code then ill go in, make sure it follows company standard format and fix the overbearing typechecks.

At the very least I still have my other skills.

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dunderball@reddit

What's the alternative nowadays though? It's starting to make less and less sense to try to write code by hand. Best I try to do is at least spend the time to code review / understand what the LLM spit out

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RedCloakedCrow@reddit

I think you kinda hinted at it, and a fairly highly-placed google engineer I spoke with a little while ago painted it explicitly: the career path is moving from "can you produce code" to "can you review code for quality".

The difficult thing is that reviewing code is a skill, and it's one that the LLMs are very unlikely to become good at (IMO). You have to know how to write good code (and why that code is good) in order to be able to review effectively.

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jupzuz@reddit

I've experimentally used Opus 4.6 to review coworkers' PRs. It's actually surprisingly good. But it's not enough. We can't just say "AI reviewed the PR, I it's good to go". At least not yet. Humans have to take responsibility for the final version. Otherwise, we lose the understanding of what's happening in the codebase. We lose ownership.

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RedCloakedCrow@reddit

I agree, and I will forever be furiously pointing at the IBM maxim.

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genghiswolves@reddit

Or there's some other aspects that I'm not considering that contradict what I just said?

Why do you think so?

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And to review code you need the experience of writing bad code yourself, so you know what not to do. You don't learn by watching a LLM code for you which in my opinion is a big problem. How will a junior become a senior if there is no real know how through experience?

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Mysterious_Pepper447@reddit

It's starting to make less and less sense to try to write code by hand

This is the unchecked assumption that is pervading in every thread right now. I think this comes down to top-down thinkers vs bottom-up thinkers. Some people start with "what do I want this software to do", and that becomes the obvious input for the prompt. But others (like myself) genuinely use "What models, objects, classes, interfaces, and functions would best represent the logic of this problem space" as their actual starting point. For me, it makes no sense to use the LLM, because if I am going to prompt it in such detail as to tell it what classes to write, then I might as well write it myself. The cognitive load is the same.

I think as more and more companies use these tools it's gonna get very expensive over the long run if the models don't get much more efficient. These AI companies are losing billions each year and will need to make money somehow. The only way I see that happening is to drive up prices once they have enough customers depending on their product. I actually hope that this will bite all companies who have the culture now to ship fast using AI.

I myself also use AI of course but only as a stackoverflow on steroids to ask questions to a chatbot. I think if I used some AI agent to do all the coding for me, I would quickly lose the know how. The brain is very efficient when it comes to "what you don't use, you lose" and this very much is true for coding.

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neoqueto@reddit

I'm now re-learning coding with AI's tutoring where it's explicitly instructed to make me think for myself and not give me answers or snippets. I grew up with trash like jQuery, MySQL and WordPress, so I don't know shit. Then vibe coding rotted my brain. I have to unlearn everything to get up to speed.

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Hollermagician@reddit

I'm on the very same boat, I love programming and AI kind of took the fun aspect out. It's prompt until it breaks and then figure out thousands of lines of slop code.

offsecthro@reddit

> I imagine 5 years time AI will be even better than it is now

How? Trained off of what?

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lulaloops@reddit

You're right. A tool that has progressively gotten better and better since its introduction will suddenly stop improving right now.

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offsecthro@reddit

I didn't make this hyperbolic statement— you did. I asked two questions which you avoided answering for some (very obvious) reason.

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grantrules@reddit

Why, AI code, of course! Can't go wrong there! Like an animal that only eats its own shit!

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WellHung67@reddit

LLMs have a theoretical limit in terms of hallucinations - they’re always going to hallucinate and it’s not possible to prevent it. This is a mathematical determination not a vibe. What’s the endgame if this is the case? These things cannot get to perfect, it is inevitable and innate. How can you trust a tool output that can make up stuff, where the errors encompass the entire space of possible wrong answers?

Humans also can be wrong, but it’s constrained to human stuff, very well studied. Decades of software best practices that have inherently been done to account for the human error. What evidence do we have that AI has a lower error rate, and that the error rate can be fixed? You need smart humans to figure that out. So the long game is what? You have to know how to code to spot the errors. And they can be subtle

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ZealousidealBet1878@reddit

If a human “hallucinates” like an llm, they will be fired for being a fraud and a liar

We call it bushing and we don’t trust people who would do that in a professional environment

We really need to put our trust in llms to the same standards

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trichotomy00@reddit

You are allowed to say bullshitting on the internet

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Beneficial_Noise_737@reddit

Good initial prompt would not be a requirement within the next 3-4 model iterations if the same orders of magnitude scale of progress continues.

Our companies budget this year for Claude code is going to get blown out of the water. I’m averaging $700 a month. There are plenty of people averaging $2k+ over 30 days. 🤯

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HannibalK@reddit

That sounds amazingly stupid. Do you really believe that?

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Meta-Four@reddit

I do think we'll see intermittent jumps in progress as AI companies crank up monetization. Right now its being rolled out as a solution to every problem, and I think well see places where it gets rolled back because of costs, especially if it doesn't fully replace the position its being used for.

I'm not sure about that. They seem to have already discovered the performance ceiling for this technology, and have reached it or very close to reaching it with the latest models. I know that the current approach to achieving the context windows they need involves massive data centers, but theoretically free models have the potential to be every bit as good, and in practice they're not far behind for regular language.

I'm not sure this is a monopolizable technology.

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tfhermobwoayway@reddit

Is the cost of AI going to go up? I heard that happened with Uber and delivery apps but are they using the same model for AI? How does that work?

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Jahonay@reddit

It's just an assumption, that's the penetration pricing approach, you flood the market without making a profit, and then once you're everywhere the prices go up. The idea is generally to win over market share with low prices, and then once you establish a market you raise prices to become profitable.

I mean, I suppose we'll see, but I don't see how else they could be profitable.

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tfhermobwoayway@reddit

I mean I guess that makes sense. I thought people would abandon food delivery apps once they shot up but it seems like more people are using them than ever. Some people just don't know how to budget.

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Pantzzzzless@reddit

People are different from corporations though. If the board starts to see money hemorrhaging from the AI pipes, they will turn that shut-off valve without a thought.

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subLimb@reddit

I wonder if this may be one reason why many firms are throwing AI so hard at their employees right now. If they expect vendors to become prohibitively expensive in the future, it might make sense to take advantage of as much cheap consumption as possible right now while using that experience to train their workers and simultaneously come up with some in-house solutions that could take take the place of vendors if it becomes necessary.

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cynicalmuddle@reddit

That's giving way to much credit to higher management of corporations. It's purely FOMO of the new shiney. Throw in the fact that it takes complicated processes and makes them appear simple and it's emotion not logic driving this little boom.

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subLimb@reddit

it's emotion not logic driving this little boom.

Sadly that is probably a lot more likely to be correct.

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Jahonay@reddit

Yeah, we'll see how people budget AI after the prices readjust.

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AUTeach@reddit

Looking at the changes in claude, they are going to move everybody to a token based model sooner rather than later.

If you are on a subscription fee, they are going to give you daily and weekly limits.

API users are already on a token basis but the rumours are that they are burning through money there too. So, the prices are going to go up up up

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Mrseedr@reddit

Doesn't claude already have multiple limit-windows per day? e.g., "your usage limits reset at 6pm"

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Pablo_Ameryne@reddit

Basically they are running these services at a loss with money from venture capital. When investors start to want to see a return they will start charging the real cost to users.

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TsyctheIsAMispelling@reddit

"...once prices readjust..." Indeed.

Check this out: https://docs.github.com/en/copilot/reference/copilot-billing/models-and-pricing#model-multipliers-for-annual-copilot-pro-and-copilot-pro-subscribers

I'm in the same boat, I'm not committed to my guess, I have no idea how it will go, I just know they will eventually need to balance their budget somehow.

I think those are reasonable guesses, I guess we will see if those sources end up closing the gap.

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AaronPK123@reddit

I'm wondering once things balance out and VC money dries up whether a human coding versus an AI will be more "bang for your buck" in terms of how much work is done for how much money.

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licorices@reddit

Yeah, if it is going as it currently is, no one will really afford AI for personal use, and even many companies will either have it extremely limited, or skip it all together. A lot of companies built around AI, wrappers and so on, will fall extremely hard the moment those costs fall onto them as well.

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EfficientPerson12@reddit

But how are we supposed to develop otherwise? Documentation? When we get stuck where do we go. Even I'm in the same boat and I'm confused

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Favoniuz7@reddit

Ask questions from seniors and/or ask questions in forums. The same way we've all done up until like 2years ago.

If you know how to develop and know how to read code, it's not really an issue. It just takes longer, but absolutely doable. I had to even debug an issue from a third party library and walk through their code. Took me almost 3 whole days, but with Google and intuition it's possible.

Nope. Dont take this personally- but I have a fully formed view on this that doesent ignore the lessons of actualy history. And im a young millennial who has been told the world is 5-10 years from ending my whole life.

The children of the people who said this about the internet are now saying it about AI. Im sick of this doomer stuff.

Shit was actually really bad in like 08-13 when I graduated HS and entered the workforce. And It finally slowly started getting better. And everyone forgot and acts like that struggle never happened. Just poof! And now ppl are forgetting the pandemic.

Everyone was scared of an Iran war now everyone treats it like another tuesday in real time. I was introduced to this doomer thinking when I was only 7 and y2k started becoming a thing and the gore-bush election. And you know what?

Im over this kinda thinking.

You can go freak out in a corner.- and im someone who believes modern globalism is facing a collapse- but even i dont buy this AI pessimism especially considering much of it is driven by "oh know it can make pictures now"

Yeah... its just the same shit over and over.

So offense to you. Im just not gonna play this game.

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gloriousGeeseGrease@reddit

lol ok. To me it sounds like you kinda proved my point. Bad things happened before, bad things happening now. Seems like they will keep happening. The job market is statistically worse now than it has been in 50 years (yes even worse than 2008 drama queen)… you think industries didn’t fully or partially die during these times? Just because hard times haven’t hit you directly doesn’t mean they didn’t eradicate other peoples lives and careers. Our time is coming because those in charge want it to. Has nothing to do with how you feel or how capable ai is. It’s about how expensive you are to employ vs a robot slave. Things are happening no matter how much you want to believe nothing ever happens

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Important_Coffee_845@reddit

actually a lot of the stuff didn't happen. Y2k for example- was solved by programmers. It's funny you mentioned ten years but u didn't even mention the y2k38 problem which is a real tangible issue not abstract bull shit.

The job market is not worse, that's propaganda. In 2008 18 year olds couldn't even get a job at McDonalds in many states and this lasted for years. today its mainly liberal arts degree holders and HR getting laid off. I see signs all over for jobs, ur generation hates hearing the truth.

I told you it wasn't personal but if u wanna drop words like drama queen suck a nut, get a job pansy. Roll up your sleeves. Ill put u to work RGHT now washing dishes in abq if your so hard up, Betty

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gloriousGeeseGrease@reddit

💀💀💀 if you think ai replacing jobs is the same risk as y2k you really are clueless. Y2K was not even a real thing. Programmers didn’t fix it, it was never an issue for 99% of systems lol. Seems like you got some wealth handed to you so you don’t actually need to know how the sausage gets made then or now. I guess you’re in charge of….dish washers? I don’t need to come work for you yet I have a job as an AI engineer lmfao. I’ll hit you up in 10 years though I guess.

Also just denying easily verifiable statistics? Okay bud good luck with that. Enjoy being king dishwasher, you really earned it.

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Important_Coffee_845@reddit

I didn't say it was the same-ur mischaracterizing what im saying and my point so im not gonna continue with you. I can post emojis too.

Ur a spoiled brat and I have no intention of talking to you-
I'm are aware jobs are being replaced but u said this is worse than the 2008 era great financial crisis it is objectively not. And the jobs currently being replaced are simple jobs I don't respect quite frankly- and that I AM not going out for. U said "our industry" doesn't sound like im in or trying to be in "your industry"

if anyone sounds clueless its you. I just said I don't wanna adopt this doomer mindset that's been around since y2k not that it's the same as y2k.

Also you might be misunderstimating y2k. y2k wasn't about jobs, it was about infrastructure. Everything very much could have collapsed. Programmers working 80+ hour work weeks saved the day. You seem to be coming from the perspective that y2k was "nothing"

It was a Big deal, but the world didn't end. It could've became very difficult and a lot of chaos could've occurred. but it didn;t because instead of panicking and sitting around talking to people like you they got to work.

Yes AI is replacing SOME people. And it's largely people who have always thought they were better than the working class. So fuck em and you-

toodles, drama queen

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cool_the_f_down@reddit

Same, currently 16 years old and I'm in a country where Computer Science and IT is automatically translated as being a call center agent

I am okay with my first website (for school) being mostly AI, and I can understand what it does, and while I probably wouldn't be able to recreate it, I was still ahead of the people around me that said that "as long as it worked its fine" and got caught

I don't know where I am at currently, and I'm scared of using AI because I don't want to rely on it

But I know that as long I don't understand it, I will not use it until I learn what it does the manual way (coding, failing, debugging, repeat)

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Important_Coffee_845@reddit

Use it. Generative AI and LLMS are not synonymous with machine learning and artificial intelligence as a whole. A lot of this AI propaganda comes from the west- people who got too comfortable and are afraid they will lose their jobs when bosses ask them "write me a line of code on the whiteboard without using your phone".

If you're worried about not becoming reliant and you've refrained this long I commend you and think you're exactly the person who should at least start off in an AI engineering role.

When I said I'm in school I mean't I'm going back to school to get credentialed so I can pivot in my career and do what I do at home and get paid for it. I'm like twice your age, pup, but you sound like you have a better head on your shoulders than most American z's and gen alphas I've come across lately.

Also learning to code is still 100% worth it. And if you start off in a call center, so what? I started off washing dishes and digging ditches during the Great Recession. I learned how to conjugate my verbs in Spanish just so I could communicate with my coworkers, and I'm not even an immigrant bro. You do what you gotta do to pay tuition, buy books, get that GPU you need burn through models, whatever.

I think someone with your self discipline and awareness should start learning how to code in industry languages ike python now. Don 't listen to the doomers

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cool_the_f_down@reddit

Thank you, I actually am starting from Python while making a website alongside it. Safe to say that I've only been using AI when I'm hardstuck, or if it's a problem I genuinely have no knowledge on.

My confidence shot up, and I'm definitely hell-bent on making my Computer Science obsession into a career.

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For sure dude. I obviously can't speak for everyone but for me and many of the other tech leads in my org., these are the best qualities you can bring to the table as a junior new hire:

Willingness to figure things out on your own
Willingness to take enough ownership of your codebase to actually have opinions and to voice those opinions when needed (This might be my #1)
Ability to exhaust all of your current knowledge on something before asking for guidance
Be able to have a normal conversation. Sometimes having a teammate who you can just talk shit with is the most valuable thing.

I know you didn't really ask about any of this lol, but it was on my mind so I figured I'd share it for anyone who cares.

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Important_Coffee_845@reddit

This is good shit. Exactly what I looked for when I was a hiring manager in hospitality- its just universal stuff that all too often gets over looked by the candidate.

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Ok_Spray1014@reddit

Beo just die already, this is some real millennial old people shit

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hollaSEGAatchaboi@reddit

when I came up you had no choice but to sit with broken shit for hours and slowly build a map of the system in your head

No, you had many choices other than that, and, yes, you're now that crank who doesn't remember how things were and is complaining in popular ways about how things are

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newId22@reddit

Perhaps it will be a problem. Perhaps the code simply will not do crazy things at 2am because ai freed enough time to allow the devs to think of all the edge cases and test thoroughly. It's a new world, we can't measure it by yesterday standards

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Deku_Scrub777@reddit

How the fuck does one get a job in this climate when places are asking for ai usage

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recursive_arg@reddit

Why even waste the tokens asking what that code does, clearly what it does it break the staging environmental…

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Mountain-Dragonfly46@reddit

“This invention, by relieving men of the need to exercise their memory, will foster forgetfulness in the souls of those who have acquired it; relying on writing, they will seek the means to remember from the outside, through foreign characters, and not from within, from the depths of their own selves; [...] As for wisdom, it is its appearance and not its reality that you impart to your students: thanks to you, in fact, having become, through hearsay, knowledgeable in many things without having received any instruction, they will appear to be able to judge many things, whereas, most of the time, they will be incapable of doing so; Moreover, they will be unbearable to be around, because they will appear to be learned without actually being so.”

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PartyFeisty2929@reddit

Lmao on call at 2am, no thanks I quit

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Charming_Cucumber_15@reddit

How much will the AI they rely on have improved in those five years? If it continues to improve at the same rate as the last 3 years, I'm not sure why anyone assumes we'll need a ton of seniors

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flamingos-are-real@reddit

If I'm the reviewer, I don't let any code pass by without an explanation. The first AI slop I see I just comment

"I don't mind you using LLMs for generating code, but reviewing the LLM's work is your job. Please, gather all evidence and information used to check the code in the PR description and then call me to review again."

Not infrequently this will be followed by an LLM generated description, which will receive the same treatment.

year 1 is fine, year 1 they ship features. it's year 5 I keep thinking about. one of them on call at 2am, prod doing something insane, AI confidently wrong, and they need to reason through an unfamiliar codebase under real pressure. I don't know what that looks like for someone who never built the muscle

They just can't handle. I tired of saying to my team "Debugging is scientific method: you analyze all the available data, elaborate an hypothesis and THEN you touch the code or the environment variables, which will result in going back to the data in case of failure." What is the first thing they do when the system is down? You guessed, your old pal Claude who will suggest them to decrease the number of workers of the reversed proxy while the Google Chrome is screaming "This is a f* CORS error, just adjust your CORS settings you dumbass"

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orgdv@reddit

Why do you think it will even be relevant in 5 years? I guess we are all just "managers" then, coding and even fixing will be completely on an AI's side. You won't need to understand what specific part of the codes do, you will have to understand a way bigger picture.

The system how we work will rapidly change. It does now and 5 years is a very very long time in AI-metrics where A LOT will change.

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RepresentativeNo5781@reddit

Maybe by then AI will solve the issues themselves.

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Imaginary_Camel_4187@reddit

The one thing I have observed is that debugging requires a mental model of the system. You must form a hypothesis, follow the traces, and rule them out. And this can only be done through experience gained from making a lot of mistakes. AI does not offer you this.

The beginners I have come across that struggle the most are those who never learned to sit with a problem long enough to actually understand it.

Using AI before you have that baseline is just borrowing against a debt you'll pay later.

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alann72@reddit

The Microsoft SOC lead said the same thing in a statement recently, she had no idea where she would hire senior developers in 5 years as she wasn’t hiring any junior developers due to ai right now.

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HyenaNo6444@reddit

A lot of interns need some type of internship sim to help them learn what interns do (I'm talking pre-employment). I actually found a website for this: internquest.app. please try before you report :'(

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Huskergambler@reddit

I wonder if AI will be caught up by year 5 and we are all replaced

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HaikusfromBuddha@reddit

It's not just juniors but every level. Amazon had this problem, even with skilled higher ups that had to approve that code.

In reality the issue is management pushing AI to improve and speed things up. Sure AI is good at that but at the same time you lose learning what AI did because you have to quickly iterate. It's do you want something fast? Or something the dev understands the ins and outs because you can't have both. Because if the Dev knows the ins and outs of the code changes they essentially lose the benefit of AI speeding things up because the Dev is essentially learning and understanding the code changes as if they implemented it.

There is going to be a loss is knowledge and there is no way around it other than AI becoming good enough to debug its own issues.

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_andvari@reddit

100% and that’s exactly how I feel. I don’t even have time to read everything the AI writes because I need to ship fast, and they’re pushing me in that direction

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SecureTaxi@reddit

In a few weeks a counterpart of mine is pushing out an infra change into three prod env. Everyone knows he leverages AI heavily to a point where he maxed out his token. I have a feeling its going to break prod because the issue he has been trying to solve have not been reproducible. When asked how confident he was in his fix, he said very sure because AI told him he was right.

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If you don't realize in 5 years software development is going to be radically different, I think you are going to have a bad time

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Dav1dBee@reddit

Will we really need juniors in 5 years though (my knowledge is quite limited)? Won't it be enough to just write a good prompt to a coding agent? I heard from my software engineer friends that they're quite good.

yeah fair point tbh

ai helps you move fast but it can hide gaps in understanding and real learning comes from fixing things when they break

some people will figure it out others might struggle later haha

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SNsilver@reddit

I keep raising this concern at my job, and it’s been brushed off so far. I have a few juniors that report to me that I’ve put on an ‘AI ban’ because they kept putting up garbage in MRs. Not sure what’s going to happen but I know it won’t be good

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gordonnowak@reddit

I don't understand this. I've just picked up claude code and if I insert it in the process loop where I would usually go off and look something up or actually type something out, generating roughly size-and-content-equivalent PRs to what I would normally produce, it takes 1/50th of the time and is indistinguishable in quality. what are you seeing that's garbage?

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shamusl93@reddit

Most of it. “Works” and “good” aren’t the same thing. If you’re looking at what Claude/Codex are actually writing you’ll see tons of over-engineered, overly defensive code that repeats itself frequently. That leads to a massive cognitive debt where it’s difficult to reason about once it breaks, and, in any reasonably side codebase, it will break. I use these tools, but I see the garbage it’s constantly creating and fixing it where appropriate. In tiny brand new codebases, it’s reasonable, throw it into 250k LOC project and it’ll ruin your codebase.

If you can’t see the garbage it’s producing, that’s more a sign that you need to spend more time learning why what it’s doing is such a bad idea.

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gordonnowak@reddit

so far I've caught it generate some particularly naive architectural ideas over long sessions but the code itself is perfectly acceptable. it's pretty easy to bound them into effective patterns by mere suggestion, and one thing I won't accept that they're bad at is writing tests. so if the stuff you're seeing is bad and breaking, I'd suggest it's a sign that you don't know how to use these tools properly

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Pantzzzzless@reddit

I would love to do the same. But my juniors are all offshore. And I don't have the power to block their EID on our licenses.

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fractalskiesahead@reddit

This thread is pure cope.

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epic_pharaoh@reddit

Ask me what a function I wrote a week ago does with or without AI and I would need a minute to figure it out as well.

Just because they are asking the AI a question and using the AI doesn’t mean they are relying on it. They are juniors, they are developing skills and trying to use the tools available to them.

If they aren’t documenting their code well enough that they don’t need an AI to summarize it for them, then you as the senior are responsible for teaching them how to do it.

I see a lot of seniors complaining that the juniors are leaning too much on AI. If that’s the case show them the tools and methods they should be using instead, show them how those methods/tools are more reliable.

People will use the tool they think is best for the job, people learning to draw with a pencil will use an eraser. If there’s a problem with how they use AI it’s your job (or at the very least your company’s responsibility) to point that out and correct it; or alternatively provide an approved coding environment where AI tools must be used externally from the IDE (in which case stackoverflow is often a more efficient solution on its own).

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you won't be needed to do *any* of that pretty soon. the starry-eyed bullshittery in this thread is insane

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quietcodelife@reddit

timeline is the part I genuinely can't call. if the window is 2 years you're probably right and most of what I said is moot. I just don't know, and I don't think anyone in this thread does either

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Doooofenschmirtz@reddit

If you don’t think ai will get infinitely better in 5 years, idk how you function

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mrgudveseli@reddit

Big "if".

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AhmetYaq8bi@reddit

Im a junior still learning, I have lately started using AI tools in the past few months, specifically because I have realised it helps me do more with less time.

I take note of changes it makes and why it does it.

I realized it has sped up my learning process.

Although at times I wish I had a senior dev as a friend I could discuss things I have dificulty understanding.

I know AI is good, but there are architectural level of details I wonder and I end up not being certain which path would be the decision a senior would make(as that is my end goal).

I dont find AI explanations on system level decisions good, as its answer for my "why" questions simply logically doesnt seem good enough.

I feel like it lacks the ability to think system wide, as I have noticed one reasoning doesnt correlate to the other, like if the thoughts where chains, many chains are breakpoint and not connected to the nex set of chains(maybe not the best anslogy), what is mean is that Something is off but im not sure why I feel that way.

Your companies need to start hiring college grads and teaching them instead of throwing this boomer-grade, “back-in-my-day” bullshit out here.

Your companies did this, not us new grads competing with people with 10yoe for junior rolls, trying to stay relevant by self-learning AI tools that weren’t even mentioned in the curriculum 10 months ago.

Not the same way they have been for the last couple of years. Right now the main problem is energy. We cant just magically build powerful stations in a year, much less 5.

Scotty is unlikely to exist.

TDD got a whole lot easier and more valuable with LLMs. I don’t think Junior devs will have a hard time. Junior devs will learn to become good engineers in a different way because it’s a different world.

In my opinion, AI will have the same impact of going from assembly to high level languages - IF it doesn't reveal itself to be an unprofitable bubble that will blow up in 2-3 years.

This is the right answer. People were freaking out the same way when Java came out and it had automatic memory management.

“How will the kids know how to handle memory issues in the future?” and all.

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Shadilios@reddit

I laugh each time I hear some CEO or one of those edgy entrepreneurs saying that AI will replace human programmers.
Specially when I try to use it to build something expandable & maintainable.
It's really great for learning, running ideas by or creating a starting template though.

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Lopsided_Cap_6606@reddit

It's interesting for me to see the difference between opinions like yours, and the ones of people saying AI will be advanced enough in the coming years for there to avoid such a problem or that there won't even be such a problem

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xTruegloryx@reddit

I'd been more worried about where you'll be in 5 years. Nobody is safe. Unless you're all set for retirement.

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immediate_push5464@reddit

I understand that senior programmers earned a lot of stripes learning this stuff. For some of them, there was no VMware or learning environment. You just fucked shit up and started over.

However, I think upcoming programmers face new challenges with new requirements and new standards in light of where we are now. And ultimately, even if it is embarrassing at times, they will be fine.

There is a level of stupidity where you draw the line at, but I don’t think this is it.

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cdrun84@reddit

I'm a Senior Software Engineer and I only know a little bit of Ruby and have been doing this for 10 years. I rely 100% on Claude now, without it I don't even know what to do anymore.

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hustla17@reddit

I am still in uni learning. We are forced to understand and explain the code personally in internship, and will be kicked out if they notice that we don't know shit. We can use llms outside the internship to complete it that's even encouraged, but at the end of the day if we do not understand what we have built , we can go home literally.

We also were forced to use the debugger in one exercise ,it was the first time in my life that I used the debugger and simultaneously also the first time I felt like a programmer and not an imposter.

I fucking hate this shit , but my future self is going to be eternally grateful for this.

I am 100% pro llm , but i am also pro critical thinking and understanding ( and also the act of physically typing code feels amazing and satisfying after finally getting it ).

I simply love this shit tbh , I am going to keep programming till the end of my days. And even if end up making burgers at least I am going to make them with O(1) in the back of my mind lool.

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Kane_ASAX@reddit

Debuggers are nice as hell. I used it a lot for C++ code like a year ago. Better than the shit typescript has

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RedCloakedCrow@reddit

I've been worrying about how a trend I noticed back in 2022 is going to combine with AI ubiquity: companies seem much less willing to invest in junior engineers, and look to hire primarily upper-mid to senior engineers.

The mental model thing is what people miss. When you spend 3 hours tracing a bug through the call stack, you're not just fixing the bug — you're building a map of the system that lives in your head permanently. AI skips that step entirely. You get the fix but not the understanding.

The scary part isn't that they can't code without AI. It's that they don't know what they don't know. They ship features, the PR looks clean, the tests pass — and nobody realizes the understanding isn't there until something breaks at 2 AM and the AI hallucinates a confident wrong answer.

I think the fix isn't "stop using AI" — it's deliberate practice without it. Like how musicians practice scales even though they could just play along to a track. Spend an hour a day debugging, reading other people's code, tracing through unfamiliar repos with nothing but the docs. Build the muscle while the stakes are low.

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FourTwentyBaked@reddit

Hmm. I find it's just a different skill entirely. I think they will be ok. I down more time on testing when I'm using ai and overall i think that is a good thing.

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Nviki@reddit

Five years ago you expected today you would be using Claude?