[deepGem]

What will eventually pan out is that senior devs will be replaced with junior devs powered by AI assistants. Simply because of the reasons you stated. They will ask the dumb important questions and then after a while, will even solve for them.

Now that their minds are free from routine and boilerplate work, they will start asking more 'whys' which will be very good for the organization overall.

Take any product - nearly 50% of the features are unused and it's a genuine engineering waste to maintain those features. A junior dev spending 3 months on the code base with Claude code will figure out these hidden unwanted features, cull them or ask them to be culled.

It'll take a while to navigate the hierarchy but they'll figure it out. The old guard will have no option but to move up or move out.

[throwway120385]

Why would Claude code help you find unused features? The end customer uses features, not the AI. I would want to know from the end customer whether a feature is unused, and a Junior with an LLM assistant is not going to be able to tell me that without adding new features to the code base.

[deepGem]

Am using Claude code as an approximation here. 2 years down the line the tooling around analytics will get integrated in AU assistants and they will be absolutely able to figure out unused features.

[alwa]

How do you suppose the old guard are filling their days now?

At some level, aren’t you describing the age-old process of maturing from junior to mid level to senior in most lines of work, and in most organizations? Isn’t that what advancing in responsibility boils down to: developing subtlety and wisdom and political credibility and organizational context? Learning where the rakes are?

I wish 3 months, or even 3 years, were long enough to fully understand the whys and wherefores and politics of the organizations I cross paths with, and the jungle of systems and code supporting all the kinds of work that happen inside…