[lordnacho]

Assuming the current way to become senior is the only way?

I could still see a select few being given a foot in the door and leaping over the "argh why doesn't it compile" stage, past the "argh, I need a whole new architecture" stage to become senior in a few years. Every cohort has a few unicorns.

Alternatively, coding goes the way of the calculator. By that I mean, the people that used to be part of the engineering team, doing arithmetic. You just hire domain experts and give them the AI hoping the domain expertise is all you need to get you through the day.

Finance has historically had a lot of people who thought they could code, now perhaps they will get better. Big risk of it becoming a mess larger than back when they got VBA.

[johnnyanmac]

I don't see "senior vibe coder" going in any way that doesn't end in constant forest fires that they try to put out with a flamethrower. This happens even with seasoned engineers. Unicorn hunting for the exceptions will be every bit as infeasible in 2045 as it was in 2005.

> You just hire domain experts and give them the AI hoping the domain expertise is all you need to get you through the day.

what domain experts? Clearly they are trying to replace everyone with AI. That's the unsettling part of the whole story; this phenomenon is happening across many sectors who want to try and skimp out on talent.

[theshrike79]

I'm thinking that the calculator analogy is better and better

An LLM will produce a solution for you, but in most cases you need to know enough about the problem to ask it to apply the right tools. Or even have enough "known unknowns" that you can direct it to search for a better solution.

Like a trivial example: an LLM will happily write a CLI argument parser from scratch. It WILL work. It'll also be complete crap UX wise.

But if you know that a specific library (Cobra, Kong, urfave/cli) fits this specific problem better, you can ask it to use it specifically.

Same with calculators - it'll always tell you the correct answer to whatever calculation you give it. But YOU need to know that this specific problem was solved by a really smart person 100 years ago and there's a formula you can apply to solve it faster - still using the calculator, but now you're using refined algebra instead of brute-forcing a solution