alt Hacker NewsThere is a deadly game of chicken going on. Junior recruiting already stopped for the most part. Only way this doesn’t end in a catastrophe is if AI becomes genuinely as good as the most skilled developers before we run out of them. Which I doubt very much but don’t find completely impossible.
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flir • today at 1:30 PM
Or if code quality stops mattering, in a kind of "ok, the old codebase is irretrievably sphagettified. Lets just have the chatbot extract all the requirements from it, and build a clean room version" kind of way. It's also not impossible we go that route.
And the irony is that AI usage should make onboarding juniors easier.
Before it was "hey $senior_programmer where's the $thing defined in this project?", which either required a dedicated person onboarding or someone's flow was interrupted - an expected cost of bringing up juniors.
Now a properly configured AI Agent can answer that question in 60 seconds, unblocking the Junior to work on something.
And no, it doesn't mean Juniors or anyone else get to make 10k line PRs of code they haven't read nor understand. That's a very different issue that can be solved by slapping people over the head.