Readit NewsYou should replace devs vertically, not horizontally, otherwise, who'll be you senior dev tomorrow?
Jokes aside, AI has the potential to reduce workforce across the board, but companies should strive to retain all levels staffed with humans. Also, an LLM can't fully replace even a junior, not yet at least.
The thing that would now make the biggest difference isn't "more intelligence", whatever that might mean, but better grounding.
It's still a big issue that the models will make up plausible sounding but wrong or misleading explanations for things, and verifying their claims ends up taking time. And if it's a topic you don't care about enough, you might just end up misinformed.
I think Google/Gemini realize this, since their "verify" feature is designed to address exactly this. Unfortunately it hasn't worked very well for me so far.
But to me it's very clear that the product that gets this right will be the one I use.
Also, if you forbid people to tell you they consulted AI, they will just not say that.
What AI does is remove a bunch of the humiliating, boring parts of being junior: hunting for the right API by cargo-culting Stack Overflow, grinding through boilerplate, getting stuck for hours on a missing import. If a half-decent model can collapse that search space for them, you get to spend more of their ramp time on “here’s how our system actually fits together” instead of “here’s how for-loops work in our house style”.
If you take that setup and then decide “cool, now we don’t need juniors at all”, you’re basically saying you want a company with no memory and no farm system – just an ever-shrinking ring of seniors arguing about strategy while no one actually grows into them.
Always love to include a good AI x work thread in my https://hackernewsai.com/ newsletter.
Really, juniors are only important because they ask "dumb" questions that can help remove useless abstractions? That your take?