[90d]

"a single staff engineer with experience and a trusty LLM is similarly productive as a team of 2-4 junior engineers"

I think we are SEVERELY underestimating the amount of slop that is going to come from this.

[skwee357]

It fascinates me how little respect software engineers get. The entire internet paints a picture of software engineers as useless code producing monkeys.

I haven’t seen anything similar in any other engineering industry.

[tomrod]

I've seen people estimate two days of work for a manual headline content update on a mature code base they know.

No new tests, no new design, no new implementation. Literally just a single word swapped.

Turns out the engineerinng team had uncertainty with the new testing framework that was mandated, and rather than document it they blew up their velocity.

This approach bites back. When work isn't understood, people on the outside disrespect the workers.

[n_ary]

Isn’t it a bit suspect that that particular image benefits a special new tool about which the OP is heavily speculating?

I am very surprised that no one in HN can see the correlation of the narrative and speculations vs the absurd age thrown around only to be repeated by actual people whose image is being tarnished because the mass narrative wants them to feel powerless(first stage of wage suppression).

[idiotsecant]

Because in other industries the engineers know something about the real world thing that they're engineering, they aren't just manipulating abstractions.

[hnthrow90348765]

There's already skill issues in the field even with senior people and without AI. It's why we test people to witch hunt for those imposters. Lots of talk about how one bad hire can ruin the whole team or something. Even competent developers stretching across multiple skillsets (front end, back end, ops) that they aren't experts in. And plenty of bad code and technical debt from bad off/on-shore contractors due to skill issues and communication barriers.

I'm not saying you're wrong though, but just that it won't be much different.

[giantg2]

Depends on how sloppy 2-4 junior devs are and thr overhead of managing and developing them. I think the comparison could be similar

[90d]

A lot more bad logic will get by the smell test when you have 1 staff member vibe-coding. And just wait until he is held to that level of zero-test, lowest hanging fruit productivity as being "normal".

[exe34]

The thing about a junior dev is that often times you can convince them to start/stop doing things a certain way.