I maintain that in the future, any person wishing to learn any skill (not just coding!) will need to willingly eschew the use of AI when learning until they have "built the muscles". The literature is clear that repeated, hands-on practice is really the only way to build skills.

I suspect the progression will be "No AI until intuition (whatever that is for that skill)" -> "Gradual use of AI to understand where it falls short" -> "AI native expert".

How to actually implement this at scale is still TBD ;-) Ironically, AI will be invaluable for this e.g. as a hyper-personalized tutor but it will also present an irresistible temptation to offload the hands-on practice. We already have studies indicating the former is helpful but the latter stifles mastery. At this point I can only see self-discipline as a mechanism to willingly avoid AI.

Unfortunately, our testing-oriented education system only serves to incentivize over-reliance on AI (Goodhart's Law etc.) None of our current institutions and processes are suited for what is already happening and will only accelerate from here on. Things will need to change radically.

For this reason, I once predicted apprenticeships will be a thing again, and already there are signs with Microsoft's preceptorship proposal: https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3779312

This is highly encouraging because a tech giant is not only acknowledging the problem, but proposing a solution. Not a complete solution by far but at least a start.

Junior devs have always been useless. You used to give them tasks that take them a week or two even though a senior engineer could do it in a couple hours, not because you wanted them to contribute, but because you wanted them to learn to contribute.

The same ethos makes sense with AI, it's just that every company is trying to avoid paying that training tax. Why turn a junior into a senior yourself if you can get the competition to pay for it instead.

As I tell my students: juniors, you must write the code

https://htmx.org/essays/yes-and/

Everyone else: we must let the juniors write the code.

Seniors come from juniors. If you want seniors, you must let the juniors write the code.

My nightmare scenario (which might start to materilize) is that our last years in the industry will be becoming prompt monkies / agent "managers" working on codebases we barely understand in such velocity there's no way we can gain real understanding. Whenever something breaks (and it will , a lot) A.I will fix it - or so we'll hope. And the sad thing is - this might work; you'll get more stuff done with fewer people. Sure, we didn't sign up for this, it's not a fun job what I've described, but why should management care? They have their own problems and A.I is threatening their jobs as well.

Actually the truth is that a lot of senior devs are not very good either, and have negative value. But they have an inflated value of themselves that does not reflect reality.

Pretty much all software projects seem to peak, and then decline in quality. There are only a handful of senior devs in the world who are actually good programmers.

AI has made senior engineers useless to me. I have purposefully asked senior engineers specific questions to get their insight on a matter only to have them tell me, "here's what our internal AI tool said". This has occurred countless times. I find that staff and principal engineers have remained extraordinarily valuable as teachers. Our junior devs have been exceptional and are eager to learn. Our seniors have become lazier and stopped being as generous with their knowledge.

This post, ironically, seems very likely to have been written by an LLM :/

"it's not x, but y", with bonus em-dash:

> your value as a developer is not in your ability to ship code. It’s in your ability to look at code

"But here’s the thing."

"And honestly?"

This is 100% an issue on the side of the senior developers. Imagine saying "these juniors are useless" because you are making them work in assembly, but C has just been released. You are giving them menial work that is no longer required to do by humans. Instead of giving them the task "update these email templates", the norm should be: "create this new service that automates an internal process". They will make mistakes and they will learn - but what they will be doing is going to be very useful and also give them chance to grow the necessary skills for this new era, with the supervision of a senior.