alt Hacker NewsI fully agree. I see this today, even "so early" in AI adoption (it's been ONLY a couple of years!). I'm a firm believer in "know the stack all the way to the bottom". Possibly I'm an extremist, I believe every developer should at least know a little bit of assembly and maybe even run the NAND game (build a computer from NAND gates - https://nandgame.com/). But basic skills lead to deeper understanding of the elements in the stack. Exactly how TCP works. BGP. Why "it's always DNS". Interrupts. Virtualization. What the hell is PSI. Why kernel space is not user space. JVM allocation pressure. String interning. Concurrency and thread sync and "why isn't my code working multi-threaded" or even "I'll just sync through the db".
I don't know how to solve these. I tried Java internal tech talks (internal to my company) but most devs just weren't interested. I try ad-hoc with sessions with devs but very rarely I feel a bite.
The pipeline is collapsing. In 5 years, who will be the next senior devs? I have so few candidates to look at, and no new ones at all.
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I feel like this has been a growing problem even before AI, I've seen so many people who have spent more years at better universities than I have, who during their junior years could barely do what I was doing when I got out of community college with only an associates, and this was back 10 years or so. I also have a few new graduates who are very solid, I don't know if it's just that their specific university prepares them better, or they took it more seriously. I remember how notoriously hard the testing was at UCF for the CS program, I hear they've made it 'easier' and I believe it was and still is pen and paper, this was for the CS Foundation course, which if you failed (and many did/have) you couldn't take upper level CS courses.
I think the reality is that schools need to stop pretending like they're producing good students just because they're doing the classwork, nobody wants to hire incompetent people.
I think the reason Anthropic thinks programming will be dead in "6 months" or whatever random nonsense they spout is because you might not need intimate knowledge, but they forget how over expensive all their tech is, by the time they can produce an always perfect software developer, will anyone be able to afford it?
Heck they can't stop people from jailbreaking the models, or from having it commit felonies.
I want to say that this isn't a new thing.
Somewhere a while back (maybe it was in a Ruby CVE) I heard the phrase of "beneath and before" relating to the layer you're working in.
You need to know what goes on beneath the layer you are working on. If you're writing Java with Spring, you should understand how the annotations work and are wired in and how Spring does its magic. If you've got methods that call a database layer, you should understand the beneath of how the database is structured.
The before part is understanding what is calling the code you are writing. What is it providing you? How is the data structured? Or if you're responsible for that, how should the data be structured so that it is easier and more reasonable for both the code you're writing and the calling code.
However, that curiosity about the other parts is largely gone. I've seen this in 2026... but I also saw it in 2010 and to some extent even before that (though in the naughties I was at a tech company and surrounded by people who were genuinely interested and proficient at their craft).
Today, I'm working with people who seem to have had their meat-ware understanding frozen at Java 7 and unable or unwilling to progress... and they've been frozen at that for the past decade.
I'm not blaming AI for that - it's been a problem since the before times. The pipeline has been collapsing for a decade with the forever junior. AI has made the forever junior more "productive" and may have accelerated the problem. I lay this firmly at the feet of the people who haven't any action to better themselves and try to learn more of the beneath and before.