AWS CEO says replacing junior devs with AI is 'one of the dumbest ideas'

The thing people miss in these “replace juniors with AI” takes is that juniors were never mainly about cheap hands on keyboards. They’re the only people in the org who are still allowed to ask “dumb” questions without losing face, and those questions are often the only signal you get that your abstractions are nonsense.

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.

Relevant post by Kent Beck from 12th Dec 2025: The Bet On Juniors Just Got Better https://tidyfirst.substack.com/p/the-bet-on-juniors-just-got...

> The juniors working this way compress their ramp dramatically. Tasks that used to take days take hours. Not because the AI does the work, but because the AI collapses the search space. Instead of spending three hours figuring out which API to use, they spend twenty minutes evaluating options the AI surfaced. The time freed this way isn’t invested in another unprofitable feature, though, it’s invested in learning. [...]

> If you’re an engineering manager thinking about hiring: The junior bet has gotten better. Not because juniors have changed, but because the genie, used well, accelerates learning.

Interesting take... I'm seeing a pattern... People think AI can do it all... BUT I see juniors often are the ones who actually understand AI tools better than seniors... That's what AWS CEO points out... He said juniors are usually the most experienced with AI tools, so cutting them makes no sense... He also mentioned they are usually the least expensive, so there's little cost saving... AND he warned that without a talent pipeline you break the future of your org... As someone who mentors juniors, I've seen them use AI to accelerate their learning... They ask the right questions, iterate quickly, and share what they find with the rest of us... Seniors rely on old workflows and sometimes struggle to adopt new tools... HOWEVER the AI isn't writing your culture or understanding your product context... You still need people who grow into that... So I'm not worried about AI replacing juniors... I'm more worried about companies killing their own future talent pipeline... Let the genies help, but don't throw away your apprentices.

I - senior - can patch an application in an unknown language and framework with the AI. I know enough to tell it to stop the wildly stupid ideas.

But I don't learn. That's not what I'm trying to do- I'm trying to fix the bug. Hmm.

I'm pretty sure AI is going to lead us to a deskilling crash.

Food for thought.

I can't help but feel this is backpedaling after the AI hype led to people entering university avoiding computer science or those already in changing their major. Ultimately we might end up with a shortage of developers again, which would be amusing.

So he's saying we should be replacing the seniors with fresh grads who are good at using AI tools? Not a surprising take, given Amazon's turnover rate.

My experience is that juniors have an easier time to ramp up, but never get better at proper engineering (analysis) and development processes (debug). They also struggle to read and review code.

I fear that unless you heavily invest in them and follow them, they might be condemned to have decades of junior experience.

old zuckerburg said 80% of junior developers would be cut in 2026, I say 80% of CEO's who replace their software engineers will be cut in 2026

1. replacing junior engineers, with AI ofcourse breaks the talent pipeline. Seniors will retire one day, who is going to replace them? Are we taking the bet, that we wont need any engineer at that time? sounds dangerous.

2. Junior engineer's heavy reliance on AI tools is a problem in itself. AI tools learn from existing code that is written by senior engineers. Too much use of AI by junior engineers will result in deterioration of engineering skills. It will eventually result in AI learning from AI generated code. This is true for most other content as well, as more and more content on internet is AI generated.

Meanwhile:

"Amazon announces $35 billion investment in India by 2030 to advance AI innovation, create jobs" https://www.aboutamazon.com/news/company-news/amazon-35-bill... (Dec 9 2025)

We frequently get juniors or interns who are perfectly capable of pumping out many LoC with the use of AI in various forms - the issue is that they _don't_ actually ever learn how to think for themselves, and can't fix problems when something goes wrong or the LLM paints itself into a corner. I have found myself doing a lot more shepherding and pairing with juniors when they can't figure something out recently, because they just have not had the space to build their own skills.

He said the same thing four months ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44972151

Junior vs senior is the wrong framing. It's "can use LLMs effectively" vs "can't use LLMs effectively".

It's like expecting someone to know how to use source control (which at some point wasn't table stakes like it is today).

Same story from 4 months ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44972151

I believe the idea is to not stop hiring juniors. Instead it's to replace anybody that commands a high salary with a team of cheaper juniors armed with LLM's. The idea is more about dragging down average pay than never hiring anybody. At least for now.

I gave opus an "incorrect" research task (using this slash command[1]) in my REST server to research to use SQLite + Litestream VFS can be used to create read-replicas for REST service itself. This is obviously a dangerous use of VFS[2] and a system like sqlite in general(stale reads and isolation wise speaking). Ofc it happily went ahead and used Django's DB router feature to implement `allow_relation` to return true if `obj._state.db` was a `replica` or `default` master db.

Now claude had access to this[2] link and it got the daya in the research prompt using web-searcher. But that's not the point. Any Junior worth their salt — distributed systems 101 — would know _what_ was obvious, failure to pay attention to the _right_ thing. While there are ideas on prompt optimization out there [3][4], the issue is how many tokens can it burn to think about these things and come up with optimal prompt and corrections to it is a very hard problem to solve.

[1] https://github.com/humanlayer/humanlayer/blob/main/.claude/c... [2] https://litestream.io/guides/vfs/#when-to-use-the-vfs [3] https://docs.boundaryml.com/guide/baml-advanced/prompt-optim... [4]https://github.com/gepa-ai/gepa

I have heard this thing quite a few times over last few months each time is Amazon or AWS CEOs. May be this time he want to replace senior engineers. That would be more useful for them as each passing year they more and more of them and in times like these they are not looking to go leave Amazon on their own.

Ive been managing and supporting teams for a long time and i'm sorry, but junior and mid-level devs do the majority of the heavy lifting when it comes to work output in big corps. I don't think AI will replace them. I don't think all these IC5 and IC6 engineers are going to be putting up 400-500 diffs a year anytime soon.

> A company that relies solely on AI to handle tasks without training new talent could find itself short of people.

I kind of agree with this point from the perspective of civilisation.

Well, yeah. Then who will become the senior engineers in 10-15 years?

But I think the actual reason was not addressed. The work of junior devs is exactly what can be replaced by AI, instead of the more complex abilities senior development possess.

I recently pair-worked with two junior developers (on their first job, but still with like 2+ years with the company) in order to transfer the know-how of something.

I realized that they are shockingly bad at most basic things. Still their PR:s look really good (on the surface). I assume they use AI to write most of the code.

What they do excel in is a) cultural fit for the company and b) providing long-term context to the AIs for what needs to be done. They are essentially human filters between product/customers and the AI. They QA the AI models' output (to some extent).

The third point is applicable to general demographic survival as well. Countries with most child birth rates, would ultimately win.

The level of cynicism here is astronomical. After discovering the strategy of "fire juniors and let a few seniors manage autonomous agents" was an abject failure, now the line is "actually juniors are great because we've brainwashed them into thinking AI is cool and we don't have to pay them so much". Which makes me want to vomit.

The only relevant point here is keeping a talent pipeline going, because well duh. That it even needs to be said like it's some sort of clever revelation is just another indication of the level of stupid our industry is grappling with.

The. Bubble. Cannot. Burst. Soon. Enough!!

Somebody gets it.

Which is a less dumb idea: replacing new grad junior devs with AI or H1Bs?

> AWS CEO says using AI to replace junior staff is 'Dumbest thing I've ever heard' (theregister.com) 1697 points by JustExAWS 3 months ago

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44972151

Does this story add anything new?

some companies doing the opposite, firing senior devs and hiring junior with AI experience

Most of the apps that I use regularly fail at least once a day nowadays. I think this is a direct cause of putting AI code in production without reviewing/QA.

Now with AI, I expect junior developers to learn much quicker and progress to senior very quickly. I'd now rather hire at least 1 of each to begin with, both "junior" and a "senior" developer and then additionally hire more juniors to quickly turn them into a "senior".

We do not need to hire anymore outside senior developers who need to be trained on the codebase with AI, given that the junior developers catch up so quickly they already replaced the need to hire a senior developer.

Therefore replacing them with AI agents was quite premature if not completely silly. In fact it makes more sense to hire far less senior developers and to instead turn juniors directly into senior developers to save lots of money and time to onboard.

Problem solved.

on a separate note- If AI eats the SaaS, what will happen to AWS?

4) Junior devs have an incomparably superior context window.

To me the more insidious problem is that we have juniors now that aren’t learning much because they lean on AI for everything. They are behind the curve.

…proceeds to replace junior devs with AI

They know AI is inefficient and mostly just a glorified "template filler" at this point...

This is performative bullshit pandering to the increased skepticism around AI. He wouldn't be saying that if AI investment was still in full swing.

I do agree with him about AI being a boon to juniors and pragmatic usage of AI is an improvement in productivity, but that's not news, it's been obvious since the very beginnings of LLMs.

They must’ve forgot who created the first tech hype bubbles in the first place bc I’m about to replace some of these companies if I don’t get hired soon

FINALLY.

shareholder wouldn't like this

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This sounds like a comment from someone who doesn't have visibility into how good the models are getting and how close they are to fully autonomous, production-grade software development.