[fallinditch]

Maybe it's the senior devs who should be the ones to worry?

Seniors' attitudes on HN are often quick to dismiss AI assisted coding as something that can't replace the hard-earned experience and skill they've built up during their careers. Well maybe, maybe not. Senior devs can get a bit myopic in their specializations. Whereas a junior Dev doesn't have so much baggage, maybe the fertile brains of youth are better in times of rapid disruption where extreme flexibility of thought is the killer skill.

Or maybe the whole senior/junior thing is a red herring and pure coding and tech skills are being deflated all across the board. Perhaps what is needed now is an entirely new skill set that we're only just starting to grasp.

[AdieuToLogic]

> Seniors' attitudes on HN are often quick to dismiss AI assisted coding as something that can't replace the hard-earned experience and skill they've built up during their careers.

One definition of experience[0] is:

  direct observation of or participation in events as a basis of knowledge

Since I assume by "AI assisted coding" you are referring to LLM-based offerings, then yes, "hard-earned experience and skill" cannot be replaced with a statistical text generator.

One might as well assert an MS-Word document template can produce a novel Shakespearean play or that a spreadsheet is an IRS auditor.

> Or maybe the whole senior/junior thing is a red herring and pure coding and tech skills are being deflated all across the board. Perhaps what is needed now is an entirely new skill set that we're only just starting to grasp.

For a repudiation of this hypothesis, see this post[1] also currently on HN.

0 - https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/experience

1 - https://blog.miguelgrinberg.com/post/why-generative-ai-codin...

[bakugo]

> Maybe it's the senior devs who should be the ones to worry?

Why would they be worried?

Who else going to maintain the massive piles of badly designed vibe code being churned out at an increasingly alarming pace? The juniors prompting it certainly don't know what any of it does, and the AIs themselves have proven time and again to be incapable of performing basic maintenance on codebases above a very basic level of complexity.

As the ladder gets pulled up on new juniors, and the "fertile brains" of the few who do get a chance are wasted as they are actively encouraged to not learn anything and just let a computer algorithm do the thinking for them, ensuring they will never have a chance to become seniors themselves, who else will be left to fix the mess?

[CuriouslyC]

If your seniors aren't analyzing the PRs being vibe coded by others in the orgs to make sure they meet quality standards, that is the source of your problem, not the vibe coding.

[sally_glance]

Wherever you look, the conclusion is the same - balance is required. Too many seniors, you get stuck in one way streets. Too many juniors, you trip over your own feet and diverge into unknown avenues. Mix AI in, I don't see how that changes much at all... Juniors drive into unknown territory faster, Seniors get stuck in their niche just as well. Acceleration yes, fundamental change of how we work - I don't see it yet.

[yakz]

Senior devs provide better instructions to the agent, and can recognize more kinds of mistakes and can recognize mistakes more quickly. The feedback loop is more useful to someone with more experience.

I had a feeling today that I should really be managing multiple instances at once, because they’re currently so slow that there’s some “downtime”.

[tonyhart7]

we literally have many no code solution like wordpress etc

do webdev is still there??? yes there are just because you can "create" something that doesn't mean you knowledge able in that area

we literally have entire industry created to fix wordpress instance + code, what do you else we need to worry for

[sorcerer-mar]

Maybe! Probably not though.