Yes, AI is absolutely accelerating work and destroying the input pipeline (junior positions), but the result is that we senior+ engineers are doing 10x more. The job is still there. But it's absolutely not as fun as it was and there are plenty of people who have given up higher level thinking and allowing Claude to try and do everything with mixed results.
which makes me think eventually there will be a breaking point due to the lack of skill development from offloading all junior work, seniors retiring, skill atrophy, technical debt, etc. LLMs will never ever go away but we may see a shift away from full agentic slophouse development because it’s not sustainable for anything that isn’t basic crud
We'll see. I'm always surprised at how bad a system can become and still function, and really do mean that in a general sense, and of course the later they break the harder they are to fix. At the very least most places are still doing a "you commit the code, you own the code" so there is still some semblance of sanity left.
there’s also a matter of maintainability, maybe systems will still “work” albeit barely but a lot of people are creating a sort of, blackbox of a codebase, where it’s impossible to navigate without using AI
eventually signing off on commits might not even matter since the signee won’t have any semblance of what they even committed when you’re dropping 10 commits a day with hundreds of LoC
but yeah we can’t tell the future. i can only hope that everything just collapses cause the industry is a joke right now
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u/SEgopher 13h ago
Yes, AI is absolutely accelerating work and destroying the input pipeline (junior positions), but the result is that we senior+ engineers are doing 10x more. The job is still there. But it's absolutely not as fun as it was and there are plenty of people who have given up higher level thinking and allowing Claude to try and do everything with mixed results.