[elephanlemon]

Strongly disagree with this. Bad junior devs might be useless, but I’ve seen good ones absolutely tear through features. Junior devs fresh out of school typically have tons of energy, haven’t been burned out, and are serious about wanting to get work done.

[raw_anon_1111]

And how do they compare to what a senior dev can do with Claude Code/Codex?

I bet you a senior could do with one good prompt to Claude what a junior would take a day to do before AI - and take time away from the senior.

[Blackthorn]

Pretty favorably, because the coding agents suck.

[raw_anon_1111]

So do junior devs. I’ve gotten great results treating coding agents as junior devs where I keep my hands on the wheel

[Blackthorn]

Some of you folks think way too highly of yourselves. Junior devs are awesome. You tell them what needs doing, if it's not well defined you have them write a document to figure it out, and then they churn away at it and will often surprise you with a brilliant solution.

Meanwhile, I've never once seen a coding agent give a brilliant solution or design to just about anything, and anything with the barest whiff of undefined-ness will simply zero in on your existing biases.

This whole thread reads like absolute insanity to me. I love getting new junior devs. They do great work.

[raw_anon_1111]

Now ask a junior dev to design a concurrency implementation. To know the complete in my case AWS SDK and write a script in 3 minutes.

https://docs.aws.amazon.com/boto3/latest/

Or do the same for IAC - same surface area - and use Terraform on one project, CloudFormation on another, and the CDK on a third and to generate code for you when you give them the correct architecture. It took me a day to do that before AI depending on the architectural complexity and I know AWS well (trust me on this). How long would it take me to delegate that to a junior dev? It took ChatGPT 2 minutes before I started using Claude just by my pasting a well labeled architecture diagram and explaining the goal.

It took me about 8 hours total to vibe code an internal web tool with a lot of features that if I had estimated before AI, I would have said a mid level developer would have taken two weeks at least. It wasn’t complex - just a CRUD app with Cognito authentication. How long would it have taken a junior developer?

[skydhash]

The one reason I can't care about these kind of arguments is that you're describing the solution, not the problem. Based on my career (maybe shorter than yours), usually you put juniors on projects of low complexity and low impact while you play the mentor role. It's not about them being a productive worker or a menial helper, it's for them to train using practical projects. Your problems don't look like suitable projects unless you want them to train them in copy-pasta from the Internet.

[Blackthorn]

Design a concurrency implementation? I sure hope they would spend more than 3 minutes on it! Concurrency lends itself to subtle bugs even when experts write it.

I'd gladly take a junior dev to do any of that work there, because they can think for themself and not hang onto any bias you unknowingly build into the prompt like it's a religion.

[bluefirebrand]

> I bet you a senior could do with one good prompt to Claude what a junior would take a day to do before AI

It would still be a waste of a seniors time to write that prompt. They should have more important things to spend time on

[raw_anon_1111]

And it’s not a waste of their time to have to give detailed requirements and troubleshooting steps to a junior developer, constantly being interrupted, and then having to check their work thoroughly?

If you have to be that detailed anyway - you might as well use AI.

[bluefirebrand]

No, teaching the next generation of humans is not a waste of time

I'm very sorry for you that you think that way

[raw_anon_1111]

So exactly how am I going to convince my management to open a req for a junior developer who is not going to help us meet our quarterly goals and take time away from the other senior developers that will either have to work longer hours or do less work?

I’m not going to work as a charity and neither are any of my coworkers. We are all here to exchange labor for money.

[bluefirebrand]

We as a collective need to convince our management of this, but that needs to start with people getting their heads out of their asses and working together instead of this mercenary attitude you have