[johnjwang]

Some engineers on my team at Assembled and I have been a part of the alpha test of Codex, and I'll say it's been quite impressive.

We’ve long used local agents like Cursor and Claude Code, so we didn’t expect too much. But Codex shines in a few areas:

Parallel task execution: You can batch dozens of small edits (refactors, tests, boilerplate) and run them concurrently without context juggling. It's super nice to run a bunch of tasks at the same time (something that's really hard to do in Cursor, Cline, etc.)

It kind of feels like a junior engineer on steroids, you just need to point it at a file or function, specify the change, and it scaffolds out most of a PR. You still need to do a lot of work to get it production ready, but it's as if you have an infinite number of junior engineers at your disposal now all working on different things.

Model quality is good, but hard to say it's that much better than other models. In side-by-side tests with Cursor + Gemini 2.5-pro, naming, style and logic are relatively indistinguishable, so quality meets our bar but doesn’t yet exceed it.

[hintymad]

It looks we are in this interesting cycle: millions of engineers contribute to open-source on github. The best of our minds use the code to develop powerful models to replace exactly these engineers. In fact, the more code a group contributes to github, the easier it is for the companies to replace this group. Case in point, frontend engineers are impacted most so far.

Does this mean people will be less incentivized to contribute to open source as time goes by?

P.S., I think the current trend is a wakeup call to us software engineers. We thought we were doing highly creative work, but in reality we spend a lot of time doing the basic job of knowledge workers: retrieving knowledge and interpolating some basic and highly predictable variations. Unfortunately, the current AI is really good at replacing this type of work.

My optimistic view is that in long term we will have invent or expand into more interesting work, but I'm not sure how long we will have to wait. The current generation of software engineers may suffer high supply but low demand of our profession for years to come.

[lispisok]

As much as I support community developed software and "free as in freedom", "Open Source" got completely perverted into tricking people to work for free for huge financial benefits for others. Your comment is just one example of that.

For that reason all my silly little side projects are now in private repos. I dont care the chance somebody builds a business around them is slim to none. Dont think putting a license will protect you either. You'd have to know somebody is violating your license before you can even think about doing anything and that's basically impossible if it gets ripped into a private codebase and isnt obvious externally.

[Daishiman]

> P.S., I think the current trend is a wakeup call to us software engineers. We thought we were doing highly creative work, but in reality we spend a lot of time doing the basic job of knowledge workers: retrieving knowledge and interpolating some basic and highly predictable variations. Unfortunately, the current AI is really good at replacing this type of work.

Most of the waking hours of most creative work have this type of drudgery. Professional painters and designers spend most of their time replicating ideas that are well fleshed-out. Musicians spend most of their time rehearsing existing compositions.

There is a point to be made that these repetitive tasks are a prerequisite to come up with creative ideas.

[blibble]

> Does this mean people will be less incentivized to contribute to open source as time goes by?

personally, I completely stopped 2 years ago

it's the same as the stack overflow problem: the incentive to contribute tends towards zero, at which point the plagiarism machine stops improving

[SubiculumCode]

Now do open science.

More generally, specialty knowledge is valuable. From now on, all employees will be monitored in order to replace them.

[mikepurvis]

My pessimistic view is that we're liable to end up cutting off the pipeline into the industry. Similar to lawyers replacing clerks with bots, if senior engineers can now command bots rather than mentor new hires, where is the on-ramp? How does one actually gain enough experience to become a senior?

Or is all this a nothing-burger, since the new hires will just be commanding bots of their own, but on lower level tasks that they are qualified to supervise?

[username223]

> Does this mean people will be less incentivized to contribute to open source as time goes by?

Yes. I certainly don't intend to put any free code online until I can legally bar AI bros from using it without payment. As Mike Monteiro put it long ago, "F** you, pay me" (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jVkLVRt6c1U)

[electrondood]

> doing the basic job of knowledge workers

If you extrapolate and generalize further... what is at risk is any task that involves taking information input (text, audio, images, video, etc.), and applying it to create some information output or perform some action which is useful.

That's basically the definition of work. It's not just knowledge work, it's literally any work.

[woah]

> Parallel task execution: You can batch dozens of small edits (refactors, tests, boilerplate) and run them concurrently without context juggling. It's super nice to run a bunch of tasks at the same time (something that's really hard to do in Cursor, Cline, etc.)

> It kind of feels like a junior engineer on steroids, you just need to point it at a file or function, specify the change, and it scaffolds out most of a PR. You still need to do a lot of work to get it production ready, but it's as if you have an infinite number of junior engineers at your disposal now all working on different things.

What's the benefit of this? It sounds like it's just a gimmick for the "AI will replace programmers" headlines. In reality, LLMs complete their tasks within seconds, and the time consuming part is specifying the tasks and then reviewing and correcting them. What is the point of parallelizing the fastest part of the process?

[johnjwang]

In my experience, it still does take quite a bit of time (minutes) to run a task on these agentic LLMs (especially with the latest reasoning models), and in Cursor / Cline / other code editor versions of AI, it's enough time for you to get distracted, lose context, and start working on another task.

So the benefit is really that during this "down" time, you can do multiple useful things in parallel. Previously, our engineers were waiting on the Cursor agent to finish, but the parallelization means you're explicitly turning your brain off of one task and moving on to a different task.

[kfajdsl]

A single response can take a few seconds, but tasks with agentic flows can be dozens of back and forths. I've had a fairly complicated Roo Code task take 10 minutes (multiple subtasks).

[ctoth]

> Each task is processed independently in a separate, isolated environment preloaded with your codebase. Codex can read and edit files, as well as run commands including test harnesses, linters, and type checkers. Task completion typically takes between 1 and 30 minutes, depending on complexity, and you can monitor Codex’s progress in real time.

[fourside]

> You still need to do a lot of work to get it production ready, but it's as if you have an infinite number of junior engineers at your disposal now all working on different things.

One issue with junior devs is that because they’re not fully autonomous, you have to spend a non trivial amount of time guiding them and reviewing their code. Even if I had easy access to a lot of them, pretty quickly that overhead would become the bottleneck.

Did you think that managing a lot of these virtual devs could get overwhelming or are they pretty autonomous?

[fabrice_d]

They wrote "You still need to do a lot of work to get it production ready". So I would say it's not much better than real colleagues. Especially since junior devs will improve to a point they don't need your hand holding (remember you also were a junior at some point), which is not proven will happen with AI tools.

[tom_m]

You also have to provide accurate instructions.

I find most often times, "bugs" aren't with writing code that doesn't compile or doesn't have passing tests. The "bugs" come from not understanding the requirements and what it is you're building.

I'm not entirely sure AI will help this at all. People are generally bad at describing software and how they want it to work. They are inaccurate there or entirely omit things in the requirements.

Yes, though, it would be overwhelming to manage a bunch of AI agents. Context switching and redirecting, guiding, will be very difficult and not everyone's cup of tea.

If argue this isn't really a result of AI though. Many people are already in this boat today. The industry is set up in this way with contractors and outsourced devs that are at a junior level...because it's the attraction of cheap labor. Many businesses are attracted to this beyond programming. One of the questions is going to be, is the cost per token economics cheaper? So long as it's cheaper, AI coding agents will have a future. If it proves to not be cheaper (and this could take years to prove out), then I don't think it'll be as popular. I think people will need to go back to the drawing board on how we use AI agents or use AI for other purposes (like training, education, developer onboarding, code reviews, debugging, etc.)

[rfoo]

You don't need to be nice to your virtual junior devs. Saves quite a lot time too.

As long as I spend less time reviewing and guiding than doing it myself it's a win for me. I don't have any fun doing these things and I'd rather yelling at a bunch of "agents". For those who enjoy doing bunch of small edits I guess it's the opposite.

[quantumHazer]

CTO of an AI agents company (which has worked with AI labs) says agents works fine. Nothing new under the sun.

[Jimmc414]

> We’ve long used local agents like Cursor and Claude Code, so we didn’t expect too much.

If you don't mind, what were the strengths and limitations of Claude Code compared to Codex? You mentioned parallel task execution being a standout feature for Codex - was this a particular pain point with Claude Code? Any other insights on how Claude Code performed for your team would be valuable. We are pleased with Claude Code at the moment and were a bit underwhelmed by comparable Codex CLI tool OAI released earlier this month.

[t_a_mm_acq]

Post realizing CC can operate same code base, same file tree on different terminals instances, it's been a significant unlock for us. Most devs have 3 running concurrently. 1. master task list + checks for completion on tasks. 2. operating on current task + documentation. 3. side quests, bugs, additional context.

rinse and repeat once task done, update #1 and cycle again. Add in another CC window if need more tasks concurrently.

downside is cost but if not an issue, it's great for getting stuff done across distributed teams..

[NewEntryHN]

The advantage of Cursor is the reduced feedback loop where you watch it live and can intervene at any moment to steer it in the right direction. Is Codex such a superior model that it makes sense to take the direction of a mostly background agent, on which you seemingly have a longer feedback loop?

[scragz]

it sounds like their approach is launch 5 with the same task and hopefully one works it out.

[_bin_]

I believe cursor now supports parallel tasks, no? I haven't done much with it personally but I have buddies who have.

If you want one idiot's perspective, please hyper-focus on model quality. The barrier right now is not tooling, it's the fact that models are not good enough for a large amount of work. More importantly, they're still closer to interns than junior devs: you must give them a ton of guidance, constant feedback, and a very stern eye for them to do even pretty simple tasks.

I'd like to see something with an o1-preview/pro level of quality that isn't insanely expensive, particularly since a lot of programming isn't about syntax (which most SotA modls have down pat) but about understanding the underlying concepts, an area in which they remain weak.

Atp I really don't care if the tooling sucks. Just give me really, really good mdoels that don't cost a kidney.

[runako]

> Parallel task execution: You can batch dozens of small edits (refactors, tests, boilerplate) and run them concurrently without context juggling.

This is also part of a recent update to Zed. I typically use Zed with my own Claude API key.

[ai-christianson]

Is Zed managing the containerized dev environments, or creating multiple worktrees or anything like that? Or are they all sharing the same work tree?

[surgical_fire]

What kind of Junior devs are you people hiring that you still need to do a lot of work to get it production ready?

I work with Junior devs. They are Junior in that they have to be pointed in the direction they must work, and would be out of their depth in guiding the implementation of major features. But simple code changes are pretty fine.

LLMs are useful, I kind of like them as code assistants, but they are very far of being even a Junior dev in terms of actually performing work.

[manmal]

In the presentation, they highlighted that the changes it makes are minimally invasive. That sounded as if it’s less prone to going on vision quests, like Claude often does. Is that something you‘ve observed as well?

[sagarpatil]

https://www.augment.new/ has a similar feature (it uses sonnet 3.7) and I’m really impressed by it. Worth trying out.

[strangescript]

it feels like openai are at a ceiling with their models, codex1 seems to be another RLHF derivative from the same base model. You can see this in their own self reported o3-high comparison where at 8 tries they converge at the same accuracy.

It also seems very telling they have not mentioned o4-high benchmarks at all. o4-mini exists, so logically there is an o4 full model right?

[aorobin]

Seems likely that they are waiting to release o4 full results until the gpt-5 release later this year, presumably because gpt-5 is bundled with a roughly o4 level reasoning capability, and they want gpt-5 to feel like a significant release.

[criddell]

If you aren't hiring junior engineers to do these kinds of things, where do you think the senior engineers you need in the future will come from?

My kid recently graduated from a very good school with a degree in computer science and what she's told me about the job market is scary. It seems that, relatively speaking, there's a lot of postings for senior engineers and very little for new grads.

My employer has hired recently and the flood of resumes after posting for a relatively low level position was nuts. There was just no hope of giving each candidate a fair chance and that really sucks.

My kid's classmates who did find work did it mostly through personal connections.

[sam0x17]

Hiring of juniors is basically dead these days and it has been like this for about 10 years and I hate it. I remember when I was a junior in 2014 there were actually startups who would hire cohorts of juniors (like 10 at a time, fresh out of CS degree sort of folks with almost no applied coding experience) and then train them up to senior for a few years, and then a small number will stay and the rest will go elsewhere and the company will hire their next batch of juniors. Now no one does this, everyone wants a senior no matter how simple the task. This has caused everyone in the industry to stuff their resume, so you end up in a situation where companies are looking for 10 years of experience in ecosystems that are only 5 years old.

That said, back in the early 00s there was much more of a culture of everyone is expected to be self-taught and doing real web dev probably before they even get to college, so by the time they graduate they are in reality quite senior. This was true for me and a lot of my friends, but I feel like these days there are many CS grads who haven't done a lot of applied stuff. But at the same time, to be fair, this was a way easier task in the early 00s because if you knew JS/HTML/CSS/SQL, C++ and maybe some .NET language that was pretty much it you could do everything (there were virtually no frameworks), now there are thousands of frameworks and languages and ecosystems and you could spend 5+ years learning any one of them. It is no longer possible for one person to learn all of tech, people are much more specialized these days.

But I agree that eventually someone is going to have to start hiring juniors again or there will be no seniors.

[_bin_]

This is a bit of a game theory problem. "Training senior engineers" is an expensive and thankless task: you bear essentially all the cost, and most of the total benefit accrues to others as a positive externality. Griping at companies that they should undertake to provide this positive externality isn't really a constructive solution.

I think some people are betting on the fact that AI can replace junior devs in 2-5 years and seniors in 10-20, when the old ones are largely gone. But that's sort of beside the point as far as most corporate decision-making.

[hintymad]

> If you aren't hiring junior engineers to do these kinds of things, where do you think the senior engineers you need in the future will come from?

Unfortunately this is not how companies think. I read somewhere more than 20 years ago about outsourcing and manufacturing offshoring. The author basically asked the same: if we move out the so-called low-end jobs, where do we think we will get the senior engineers? Yet companies continued offshoring, and the western lost talent and know-how, while watching our competitor you-know-who become the world leader in increasingly more industries.

[johnjwang]

To be clear, we still hire engineers who are early in their careers (and we've found them to be some of the best folks on our team).

All the same principles apply as before: smart, driven, high ownership engineers make a huge difference to a company's success, and I find that the trend is even stronger now than before because of all the tools that these early career engineers have access to. Many of the folks we've hired have been able to spin up on our codebase much faster than in the past.

We're mainly helping them develop taste for what good code / good practices look like.

[gcanyon]

> If you aren't hiring junior engineers to do these kinds of things, where do you think the senior engineers you need in the future will come from?

I know this isn't what you want to hear, but what makes you think senior engineers will be in short supply in "the future"?

I'm not even a developer (anymore, I was in the past), I'm a product manager, and I'm pretty sure I can see the point in a few years where not just developers but people like me get disintermediated. My customers have a semi-reasonable grasp of what they're looking for, and they can speak. In a few years -- ten at the absolute most -- my customers will say to an AI, "I need an application that does XYZ" and the AI will reply, "Are you sure about that? Most people who say they need XYZ end up using an app that does WXY." My (former) users will reply, "Let's try it my way and see what happens." And the AI will say, "Okay, here are three popular UI styles, which do you prefer?" etc. etc.

We're headed for Interesting Times.

[ilaksh]

I don't think jobs are necessarily a good plan at all anymore. Figure out how to leverage AIs and robots as cheap labor, and sell services or products. But if someone is trying to get a job, I get the impression that networking helps more than anything.

[polskibus]

I think the bigger problem, that started around 2022 is much lower volume of jobs in software development. Projects were shutdown, funding was retracted, even the big wave of migrations to the cloud died down.

Today startups mostly wrap LLMs as this is what VCs expect. Larger companies have smaller IT budgets than before (adjusted for inflation). This is the real problem that causes the jobs shortage.

[oytis]

I guess the industry leaders think we'll not need senior engineers either as capabilities evolve.

But also, I think this underestimates significantly what junior engineers do. Junior engineers are people who have spent 4 to 6 years receiving a specialised education in a university - and they normally need to be already good at school math. All they lack is experience applying this education on a job - but they are professionals - educated, proactive and mostly smart.

The market is tough indeed, and as much it is tough for a senior engineer like myself, I don't envy the current cohort of fresh grads. It being tough is only tangentially related to the AI though. Main factor is the general economic slowdown, with AI contributing by distracting already scarce investment from non-AI companies and producing a lot of uncertainty in how many and what employees companies will need in the future. Their current capabilities are nowhere near to having a real economic impact.

Wish your kid and you a lot of patience, grit and luck.

[geekraver]

Same, mine is about to graduate with a CS masters from a great school. Couldn't get any internships, and is now incredibly negative about ever being able to find work, which doesn't help. We're pretty much looking at minimum wage jobs doing tech support for NGOs at this point (and the current wave of funding cuts from Federal government for those kind of orgs is certainly not going to help with that).

[slater]

> If you aren't hiring junior engineers to do these kinds of things, where do you think the senior engineers you need in the future will come from?

Money number must always go up. Hiring people costs money. "Oh hey I just read this article, sez you can have A.I. code your stuff, for pennies?"

[meta_ai_x]

A junior engineer can always become a senior engineer by using Gemini/ChatGPT to build full systems and literally asking chatGPT, a series of Why questions to every output.

In fact not being bottle necked by senior engineers or not having to drawe the luck of a bad senior engineer/mentor, there will be a new stars of Junior engineers.

What you should be worried is Senior Engineers who hate AI

[inkyoto]

> My employer has hired recently and the flood of resumes after posting for a relatively low level position was nuts.

I am utterly perplexed with the current situation on the job market, which seems to be a global phenomenon that is not constrained to a particular country or region. Late last year, I was hiring for two junior software engineering positions and (through an external recruitment partner) we received over 400 job applications for two junior positions. We, however, scrambled to narrow the number of candidates down to ten, out of which eight turned out to be lemons and two ended up being exceptionally good. 390 other applicants ended up being pure white noise.

Colleagues in a neighbouring business unit reported receiving over 600 submissions for a single position.

I have approached a few headhunters in the last couple of months with informal questions about what has been happening. They are under constant duress, receiving hundreds upon hundreds of applications for pretty much any position. The feedback is that when most people see a job ad, they put their resume through GenAI and submit whatever garbage comes out of it without even looking at the output. The vast majority of people can't even be bothered to write a simple cover letter, which could have been used as a shibboleth for the hiring manager / recruiter: «I am an intelligent human being, and I am real».

Naturally, the headhunters have responded with GenAI-assisted tools to sift through piles of putrid trash. The side effect is that such good, qualified applicants do not usually get a chance to get screened in.

The situation does not seem to be changing, and the only way out seems to be applying through a professional network or connections. People abusing GenAI are hurting themselves (ironically, GenAI has become pretty good at recognising GenAI-generated content), and they are also hurting pretty much everyone else in the process, and they do not care.

[richardw]

Your kid with a set of AI’s is going to blow the greybeards out of the water in a few years. They learn and iterate a lot faster. They just accept the latest tech as a given.

- greybeard who is trying his hardest to keep up

[knuppar]

Being quite blunt, just a cs degree from a good school has not been enough for quite some time. Research experience, OSS contribs, some specialty (ML, compilers, ...) are a must. I don't find this to be a problem, since it dilutes the value of an ivy league education.

On top of that, you need to be really sharp at leetcode for any large-ish company.

I find the "ai tools are junior engineers" narrative flawed, but it has any way accelerated the higher and higher expectations for a junior.

[atonse]

I feel for your daughter. I can totally see how tools like this will destroy the junior job market.

But I also wonder (I'm thinking out loud here, so pardon the raw unfiltered thoughts), if being a junior today is unrecognizable.

Like for example, that whatever a "junior" will be now, will have to get better at thinking at a higher level, rather than the minute that we did as juniors (like design patterns and all that stuff).

So maybe the levels of abstraction change?

[api]

Our company predates AI and still doesn’t make much use of it. It’s not that useful for what we do. We have never had a junior engineering position open. Nothing we do is junior enough. There are literally no jobs in the company doable by someone with less than 5-10 years experience minimum.

This is a very valid concern that predates AI by decades. AI just makes it worse. How will we raise the next generation of experts when there is no entry level of anything? We have either outsourced or automated everything below mid career level.

This is an area that I agree with some on the nationalist right — at least about the diagnosis, but not about the cure. If we continue down this road we end up with abandoned generations struggling to pay bills beneath an entrenched gerontocracy. If we do crack any kind of real age reversing life extension this could get really dystopian, like bad cyberpunk movie stuff, where you have generations of the impoverished beneath a pickled elite that never dies and owns everything.

[ozgrakkurt]

Graduating as a junior is just not enough in a more competitive market like there is now. I don’t think it is related to anything else. If you can hire a developer that is spending 10x time coding or a developer that has studied and graduated, this is not much of a choice. If you don’t have the option than you might go with a junior

[ouraf]

Don't shoot the messenger. He's just sharing his experience with the tool and using an anecdotal example.

[TeMPOraL]

> If you aren't hiring junior engineers to do these kinds of things, where do you think the senior engineers you need in the future will come from?

Cynical answer for the immediate future: maybe from the pool of existing seniors and principals that have all been stuck doing a faux-management job onboarding, mentoring and managing the juniors who were the only ones actually writing any code in many tech companies? It's a reversal of a trend, for sure: my feeling about the market until the last year or two, was that there's hardly any job for seniors or above, that isn't just management without the title and its privileges.

Past the immediate future, if we end up replacing juniors with LLMs, then the next cohort of "seniors" will need to come from some kind of vocational training.

[layer8]

I share your worries, but the time horizon for the supply of senior engineers drying up is just too long for companies to care at this time, in particular if productivity keeps increasing. And it’s completely unclear what the state of the art will be in 20 years; the problem might mostly solve itself.

[arewethereyeta]

By the rate at which these things advance I would say the "Seniors" will come from there too. We are transforming into architects or going at higher levels at least. Teach your kids to be better architects instead, code is dying. My 2c at least

[FilosofumRex]

> If you aren't hiring junior engineers..., where do you think the senior engineers you need in the future will come from?

This problem might be new to CS, but has happened to other engineers, notably to MechE in the 90's, ChemE in 80's, Aerospace in 70's, etc... due to rapid pace of automation and product commoditization.

The senior jobs will disappear too, or offshored to a developing country: Exxon (India 152 - 78 US) https://jobs.exxonmobil.com/ Chevron (India 159 - 4 US) https://careers.chevron.com/search-jobs

[kypro]

> If you aren't hiring junior engineers to do these kinds of things, where do you think the senior engineers you need in the future will come from?

They'll probably just need to learn for longer and if companies ever get so desperate for senior engineers then just take the most able/experienced junior/mid level dev.

But I'd argue before they do that if companies can't find skilled labour domestically they should consider bringing skilled workers from abroad. There are literally hundreds of millions of Indians who got connected to the internet over the last decade. There's no reason a company should struggle to find senior engineers.

[wrsh07]

The junior engineers on my team are just supercharged and their job is different from when I was a junior engineer.

I would say: ten years ago there was a huge shortage of engineers. Today, there is still lots of coding to be done, but everyone is writing code much faster and driven people learn to code to solve their own problems

Part of the reason it was so easy to get hired as a junior ten years ago was because there was so much to do. There will still be demand for engineers for a little while and then it's possible we will all be creating fairly bespoke apps and I'm not sure old me would call what future me does "programming".

[AlexCoventry]

It's worth keeping in mind that we're probably in a recession at the moment, due to US Executive policies which the tech industry largely disagrees with, and over which it has little influence.

[ikiris]

Much like everything in the economy currently, externalities are to be shouldered by "others" and if there is no "other" in aggregate, well, it's not our problem. Yet.

[dgb23]

AI might play a role here. But there's also a lot of economic uncertainty.

It's not long ago when the correction of the tech job market started, because it got blown up during and after covid. The geopolitical situation is very unstable.

I also think there is way too much FUD around AI, including coding assistants, than necessary. Typically coming either from people who want to sell it or want to get in on the hype.

Things are shifting and moving, which creates uncertainty. But it also opens new doors. Maybe it's a time for risk takers, the curious, the daring. Small businesses and new kinds of services might rise from this, like web development came out of the internet revolution. To me, it seems like things are opening up and not closing down.

Besides that, I bet there are more people today who write, read or otherwise deal directly with assembly code than ever before, even though we had higher level languages for many decades.

As for the job market specifically: SWE and CS (adjacent) jobs are still among the fastest growing, coming up in all kinds of lists.

[mhitza]

> It seems that, relatively speaking, there's a lot of postings for senior engineers and very little for new grads.

That's been the case for most of the last 15 years in my experience. You have to follow local job markets, get in through an internship, or walk in at local companies and ask. Applying en mass can also help, and so does having some code on GitHub to show off.

[harrison_clarke]

i think there's an opportunity here

a lot of junior eng tasks don't really help you become a senior engineer. someone needs to make a form and a backend API for it to talk to, because it's a business need. but doing 50 of those doesn't really impart a lot of wisdom

same with writing tests. you'll probably get faster at writing tests, but that's about it. knowing that you need the tests, and what kinds of things might go wrong, is the senior engineer skill

with the LLMs current ability to help people research a topic, and their growing ability to write functioning code, my hunch is that people with the time to spare can learn senior engineer skills while bypassing being a junior engineer

convincing management of that is another story, though. if you can't afford to do unpaid self-directed study, it's probably going to be a bumpy road until industry figures out how to not eat the seed corn

[dalemhurley]

We have seen this in other industries and professions.

As everything is so new and different at this stage we are in a state of discovery which requires more senior skills to work out the lay of the land.

As we progress, create new procedures, processes, and practices, particularly guardrails then hiring new juniors will become the focus.

[eru]

> If you aren't hiring junior engineers to do these kinds of things, where do you think the senior engineers you need in the future will come from?

Hasn't this been a common refrain whenever someone found a way to automate any menial task in any job?

[throw1235435]

This may be unpopular/counter-intuitive to say, but in a capitalist world this is probably the best outcome IF (and I'm not saying I can predict the future) we expect the profession to die/be obsolete from a society POV - in such a world restricting juniors before they commit a whole career to that profession and invest too much resources into it is actually the outcome we probably want. Better than the alternative of even more mass unemployment later. If that's the case then giving people that info early, and avoiding more hiring/training now stops potential mal-investment of money and people's time into training/hiring/building careers in/etc.

It stops juniors investing their life/time/energy in a field that is shrinking and that will increasingly "not be worth it" w.r.t effort put in given their longer time horizon. This is how capitalism when working correctly can obsolete jobs somewhat charitably - it does it by closing the door on entry level jobs ideally when people have little to lose and haven't yet invested a lot of their life into it. For example they may still be young enough to re-train; or may be dismayed from entering the field due to disruption/chatter and so do something more appropriate in the new world.

Being hired in a sinking and increasingly more competitive field may actually be considered a "winner's curse" outcome, in that you will be in a industry highly competitive that is slowly sinking and is stressful with low opportunities for pay rises compared to other industries/skill sets - this is definitely playing your career in "hard mode". Most of all you will feel your skills, and value is useless relatively to people who got into more jobs with more scarcity playing life in "easy mode" with less stress and anxiety. In a few years time people getting into other fields may feel they "dodged a bullet" comparing themselves to others that did.

Being able to pivot while you are still young and ageism isn't a barrier yet is definitely something to consider remembering careers these days are multi-decades long. I feel for your kid now, and I do for mine, but I would rather than try something different in their 20's vs say their 40's when they have a mortgage, a family to feed, and/or other commitments and ageism makes it harder to pivot/re-train into another career. I don't wish my kids to feel the anxiety I and many people I know are feeling later in life especially for a career that requires constant effort to maintain and keep relevant in. I'm not recommending my kids learn what I do at all for example.

[whiddershins]

I would like to take this moment to point out that in NY it is ~illegal for me to hire an unpaid intern and train them by for example saying: - this is codex, here is a bunch of tickets - enter each ticket into codex, then review each change and understand what it did. if you think what it did is good, open a PR - twice a day we will meet and i will review all the codex PRs with you and explain what is and isn't working

etc.

This would not save me time. It would be paying it forward. And I cannot do this.

[DGAP]

There aren't going to be senior engineers in the future.

[voidspark]

This is exactly the problem. The top level executives are setting up to retire with billions in the bank, while the workers develop their own replacements before they retire with millions in the bank. Senior developers will be mostly obsolete too.

I have mentored junior developers and found it to be a rewarding part of the job. My colleagues mostly ignore juniors, provide no real guidance, couldn't care less. I see this attitude from others in the comments here, relieved they don't have to face that human interaction anymore. There are too many antisocial weirdos in this industry.

Without a strong moral and cultural foundation the AGI paradigm will be a dystopia. Humans obsolete across all industries.

[echelon]

The never ending march of progress.

It's probably over for these folks.

There will likely(?, hopefully?) be new adjacent gradients for people to climb.

In any case, I would worry more about your own job prospects. It's coming for everyone.

[obsolete_wagie]

You need someone thats technical to look at the agent output, senior engineers will be around. Junior engineers are certainly being replaced

[alfalfasprout]

TBH the people I see parroting the LLM=junior engineer BS are almost always technically incompetent or so disconnected at this point from what's happening on the ground that they wouldn't know either way.

I've been using the codex agent since before this announcement btw along with most of the latest LLMs. I literally work in the AI/ML tooling space. We're entering a dangerous world now where there's super useful technology but people are trying to use it to replace others instead of enhance them. And that's causing the wrong tools to be built.