[justanything]

I wanna pick your brain a lil. Are you saying agentic AI has helped you replace devs that you would otherwise need for your startup?

In your opinion, what should one do/learn to get a SDE/related gig now? What do you/other companies look for?

[jillesvangurp]

Not replace but it allows me to scale what we do for things we previously would have dropped because it would require growing the team, which we can't really afford. It's a case of getting a bit more out of developers in terms of quantity and scope (mostly this) of what they do. Not a full developer but enough for it to be meaningful. But it's not nothing either. Worth paying for. AI is a lot cheaper than a developer is so I don't need to replace my developers. I prefer people that are multi disciplinary and able to pick up new skills as they are needed. Agentic AIs are good for that because they give you enough to work with that you can get productive with whatever you need to wrap your head around in little to no time.

Companies can be a bit slow to update their hiring processes to their needs. But good developers should be ahead of the curve in any case. For this, just be proficient with the tools.

Be ready for the inevitable interview question "so, AI ... explain me how you are using it and what you are doing with it?". Much easier to answer that question if you have some meaningful time of routinely using this stuff behind you and can articulate what works and doesn't work for you.

And if they don't ask, that's actually a great question to ask back if you get the opportunity "I've been using agentic tooling, how are you guys using that a <company name>? Also I would like a subscription to <my favorite AI tool> if I work for you". Stuff like that makes you stand out as ambitious and interested in the future. There are of course going to be places that maybe don't like that. But then ask yourself whether you'd want to work there. So, either way, you learn something.

[justanything]

Thank you for responding :)

So, would you consider it a bad idea to get into web dev, more specifically backend and infra?

Do you think using LLMs can accelerate learning software dev and programming skills?

[jillesvangurp]

I would look forward to the next 20 years and not backward to the last 20.

The whole frontend/backend distinction did not really exist until the web. And infrastructure is definitely something that should be automated far more than it currently is. If it needs babysitting by a team of devops, you just created a lot of work rather than automating/solving it. Tedious and repetitive. It has "AI will make this a lot easier" written all over it.

So, just be ready for the ambition level to be raised for developers. Learn to build the whole system, not just bits and pieces of the system. Lean on AI to get stuff done and figure things out. It's all just code. None of it is really that hard. But it can be a lot of work if you do all of it manually.

And let's be honest, agentic tools are showing promise and great progress but they are nowhere close to independently working on existing code bases. That's not how I use them. But they are great for problem solving, debugging, prototyping, exploring some new languages and APIs, and generally taking care of more tedious coding tasks.

[indymike]

> I wanna pick your brain a lil. Are you saying agentic AI has helped you replace devs that you would otherwise need for your startup?

I need fewer devs to get more work done... but interestingly it has put a premium on experience because a lot of the "human work" is debugging and fixing where the LLM missed the mark. So less headcount, higher skill required.

[justanything]

what would someone with less or no experience do then? to be desirable?

[indymike]

Making things fast with llms.