>You pay junior devs way way way more money for the privilege of them being bad.

I hope you don't think that what you're paying for an LLM today is what it actually costs to run the LLM. You're paying a small fraction.

So much investment money is being pumped into AI that it's going to make the 2000 dot-com bubble burst look tiny in comparison, if LLMs don't start actually returning on the massive investments. People are waking up to the realities of what an LLM can and can't do, and it's turning out to not be the genie in the bottle that a lot of hype was suggesting. Same as crypto.

The tech world needs a hype machine and "AI" is the current darling. Movie streaming was once in the spotlight too. "AI" will get old pretty soon if it can't stop "hallucinating". Trust me I would know if a junior dev is hallucinating and if they actually are then I can choose another one that won't and will actually become a great software developer. I have no such hope for LLMs based on my experiences with them so far.

At least it’s easier to teach yourself anything now with an LLM? So maybe it balances out.

Maybe it's the senior devs who should be the ones to worry?

Seniors' attitudes on HN are often quick to dismiss AI assisted coding as something that can't replace the hard-earned experience and skill they've built up during their careers. Well maybe, maybe not. Senior devs can get a bit myopic in their specializations. Whereas a junior Dev doesn't have so much baggage, maybe the fertile brains of youth are better in times of rapid disruption where extreme flexibility of thought is the killer skill.

Or maybe the whole senior/junior thing is a red herring and pure coding and tech skills are being deflated all across the board. Perhaps what is needed now is an entirely new skill set that we're only just starting to grasp.

See if the promise was real: llms are great skill multipliers! Then it is the new renaissance of one developer businesses popping up left and right every day! Ain't nobody got time for corporate coercion hierarchy nonsense.

Hmm no news about that really

> I really would not want to be a junior dev right now... Very unfair and undesirable situation they've landed in.

I don't really get this, at the beginning of my career I masquaraded as a senior dev with experience as fast as I could until it was laundered into actual experience

Form the LLC and that's your prior professional experience, working for it

I felt I needed to do that and that was way before generative AI, like at least a decade

> You pay junior devs way way way more money for the privilege of them being bad.

Oh, it's worse than that. You do that, and they complain that they are underpaid and should earn much, much more. They also think they are great, it's just you, the old-timer, that "doesn't get it". You invest lots of time to work with them, train them, and teach them how to work with your codebase.

And then they quit because the company next door offered them slightly more money and the job was easier, too.

I think it would be great to be a junior dev now and be able to learn quickly with llms.