[tossandthrow]

What theory is that?

My experience is the absolute opposite. I am much more in control of quality with Ai agents.

I am never letting junior to midlevels into my team again.

In fact, I am not sure I will allow any form of manual programming in a year or so.

[MeetingsBrowser]

> I am never letting junior to midlevels into my team again

Exactly. You control the quality of the people in your team. You can train, fire, hire, etc until you get the skill level you want.

You have effectively no control over the quality of the output from an LLM. You get what the frontier labs give you and must work with that.

[tossandthrow]

That is not correct.

It is much easier to control quality of an Ai than of inexperienced developers.

[MeetingsBrowser]

I think we are talking past each other.

> I am never letting junior to midlevels into my team again

My point is, you control the experience level of the engineers on your team. The fact that you can say you won't let junior or midlevels on your team proves that.

You do not have that level of control with LLMs. Anthropic and OpenAI are roughly the same quality at any given time. The rest are not useful.

[tossandthrow]

Ah, so that is not entirely correct.

I can control LLMs through skills and other gateways.

There are still tasks that LLMs does not really carry out that well, where a proper senior is needed.

Butnthese tasks are quickly disappearing, especially while the code base is slowly being optimized for agentic engineering.

[DrJokepu]

Eh. You want a good mix of experience levels, what really matters is everyone should be talented. Less experienced colleagues are unburdened by yesterday’s lessons that may no longer be relevant today, they don’t have the same blind spots.

Also, our profession is doomed if we won’t give less experienced colleagues a chance to shine.

[tossandthrow]

Our profession is likely doomed not because we don't train people, but by the lack of demand

[bluefirebrand]

> I am never letting junior to midlevels into my team again

From a different one of your posts

So you're the one dooming the profession. Nice work, thank you!

[tossandthrow]

No, I genuinely don't belive there is the future demand for that many developers.

And the developers we need do not jump through the career progression of Junior to senior.

Why the f** would I keep investing in a profession I think is dead or seriously contracting?

[jlarcombe]

Do you not find that depressing and sad? Do you never work with enthusiastic and talented junior developers at the start of their careers? Do you not enjoy interacting with them?

[tossandthrow]

Well...

I think it would be more depressing taking in exited junior developers, spending years of their life not believing that they are growing into any real career.

> ... the start of their careers

It is exactly this assumption I am challenging.

What comes next, I don't know - and I am not trying to kid myself or any others that I am well suited as a mentor for person starting out their career in the current environment.