[K0balt]

Long form engineering tasks aren’t doable yet without supervision. But I can say in our shop, we won’t be hiring any more junior devs, ever, except as (in my region, free) interns or because of some extraordinary capabilities, insights, or skills. There just isn’t any business case for hiring junior devs to do the grunt work anymore.

But, the vast majority of work that is done in the world is not in the same order of magnitude of complexity or rigor that is required by long form engineering.

While models may not outperform an experienced developer, they will likely outperform her junior assistant, and a dev using ai effectively will almost certainly outperform a team of three without ai, in most cases.

The salient fact here is not that the human is outperformed by the model in a narrow field of extraordinary capability, but rather that the model can outperform that dev in 100 other disciplines, and outperform most people in almost any cerebral task.

My claim is not that models outperform people in all tasks, but that models outperform all people at many tasks, and I think that holds true with some caveats, especially when you factor in speed and scale.

[naveen99]

What does junior or senior have anything to do with it ? I would think a smarter junior will run circles around a dumber senior engineer with LLM autocomplete.

[K0balt]

If you’re hiring dumb senior engineers you’re holding it wrong lol. Using LLMs is a lot like delegating to a team from a skills perspective, so it favors extensive domain knowledge. You don’t just commit whatever it writes, just like you wouldn’t commit what a junior dev writes without scrutiny. Experience makes that scrutiny more valuable and effective.