As a senior developer you already spend a significant amount of time planning new feature implementations and reviewing other people's code (PRs). I find that this skill transitions quite nicely to working with coding agents.
I don't disagree but... wouldn't you rather be working with actual people?
Spending the whole day chatting with AI agents sounds like a worst-of-both-worlds scenarios. I have to bring all of my complex, subtle soft skills into play which are difficult and tiring to use, and in the end none of that went towards actually fostering real relationships with real people.
At the end of the day, are you gonna have a beer with your agents and tell them, "Wow, we really knocked it out of the park today?"
Spending all day talking to virtual coworkers is literally the loneliest experience I can imagine, infinitely worse than actually coding in solitude the entire day.
It's a double-edged sword. AI agents don't have a long-term context window that gets better over time. People who employ AI agents today instead of juniors are going to find themselves in another local maximum: yes, the AI agent will make you more productive today compared to a junior, but (as the tech stands today) you will never be able to promote an AI agent to senior or staff, and you will not get to hire out an army of thousands of engineers that lets you deliver the sheer throughput that FAANG / Fortune 500 are capable of. You will be stuck at some shorter level of feature-delivery capacity.
My employer can't go out and get me three actual people to work under me for $30 a month.
EDIT: You can quibble on the exact rate of people's worth of work versus the cost of these tools, but look at what a single seat on Copilot or Cursor or Windsurf gets you, and you can see that if they are only barely more productive than you working without them, the economics are it's cheaper to "hire" virtual juniors than real juniors. And the virtual juniors are getting better by the month, go look at the Aider leaderboards and compare recent models to older ones.
You will hit two problems in this "only hire virtual juniors" thing:
* the wall of how much you can review in one day without your quality slipping now that there's far less variation in your day
* the long-term planning difficulties around future changes when you are now the only human responsible for 5-20x more code surface area
* the operational burden of keeping all that running
The tools might get good enough that you only need 5 engineers to do what used to be 10-20. But the product folks aren't gonna stop wanting you to keep churning out the changes, and the last 2 years of evolution of these models doesn't seem like it's on a trajectory to cut that down to 1 (or 0) without unforeseen breakthroughs.
munificent|8 months ago
Spending the whole day chatting with AI agents sounds like a worst-of-both-worlds scenarios. I have to bring all of my complex, subtle soft skills into play which are difficult and tiring to use, and in the end none of that went towards actually fostering real relationships with real people.
At the end of the day, are you gonna have a beer with your agents and tell them, "Wow, we really knocked it out of the park today?"
Spending all day talking to virtual coworkers is literally the loneliest experience I can imagine, infinitely worse than actually coding in solitude the entire day.
solatic|8 months ago
cwyers|8 months ago
EDIT: You can quibble on the exact rate of people's worth of work versus the cost of these tools, but look at what a single seat on Copilot or Cursor or Windsurf gets you, and you can see that if they are only barely more productive than you working without them, the economics are it's cheaper to "hire" virtual juniors than real juniors. And the virtual juniors are getting better by the month, go look at the Aider leaderboards and compare recent models to older ones.
majormajor|8 months ago
* the wall of how much you can review in one day without your quality slipping now that there's far less variation in your day
* the long-term planning difficulties around future changes when you are now the only human responsible for 5-20x more code surface area
* the operational burden of keeping all that running
The tools might get good enough that you only need 5 engineers to do what used to be 10-20. But the product folks aren't gonna stop wanting you to keep churning out the changes, and the last 2 years of evolution of these models doesn't seem like it's on a trajectory to cut that down to 1 (or 0) without unforeseen breakthroughs.
aqme28|8 months ago
> I still don't understand the benefit of relying on someone/something else to write your code and then reading it, understand it, fixing it, etc.
What they're saying is that they never have coworkers.
colonelspace|8 months ago
worldsayshi|8 months ago