alt Hacker News> and they're just as capable as using AI as anyone
Wouldn't the assumption be the opposite, in that AI is magnifying the decision making of the engineer and so you get more payback by having the senior drive the AI?
Replies
100% this. AI is automating the code generation.
Being able to clearly describe a problem and work with the AI to design a solution, prioritise what to put the AI to work on, set up good harnesses so the quality of the output is kept high, figure out what parallelises well and what’s going to set off agents that are stepping on each others toes… all of this needs experience and judgement and delegation and project organisation skills.
AI is supercharging tech leads. Beginners might be able to skill up faster, but they’re not getting the same results.
For a good senior, yes you get massive returns, which is why those good seniors are in incredibly high demand right now.
For average to low-performing intermediates/seniors... there's not much difference in output between them and a good junior at this point. Claude really raised the skill floor for software development.
Yep. I've seen this personally. The ROI of a great engineer is bigger than ever.
I've found this to be true so far, junior engineers with AI can be super productive but they can also cause a lot of damage (more outages than ever) and AI amplifies the sometimes poorly designed code they can generate.
I suspect a lot of it best practices will be enforcing best practices via agents.md/claude.md to create a more constrained environment.