[dapangzi]

This matches my experience so hard that I wrote a novel below, have seen this pattern a lot, wanted to expand so people can understand the cycle/pattern.

Let's propose a generic scenario that shows why being able to engineer and read code is still important, and is a story we've all heard or seen a thousand times since the great LLMing of 2025.

"Just deliver the feature/product, we expect `ridiculousMetric` increase in productivity due to LLM" screeching from management and product/business.

A junior engineer will find someone who is willing to rubber stamp their LLM PRs so seniors or designated product experts don't even get a chance to check.

The LLM modifies existing tests to game everything to pass, the junior doesn't know any better, and so it quietly makes it to prod.

Because management is thinking in sprints, the way they see it, the ticket is closed, it's a win.

Then the broken production code, which junior will eventually be promoted for because the ticket is closed on paper, breaks prod, causes a huge outage costing `hugeNumber` dollars to the organization, and senior engineers have to clean it up. To boot, the spend metric is trash because of the LLM not knowing how to scale infra.

Since juniors can't meaningfully debug due to the toxic cycle, seniors spend too much time cleaning things up and it blocks their deliverables, and seniors look bad to leadership. Then they get managed out for not delivering, while the juniors lacking engineering experience due to the toxic cycle continue to rise through the ranks for delivering, even though their deliverables are trash.

I don't blame the juniors, they are under immense pressure and genuinely don't know better. I blame short-sighted leadership.

I've heard this story from contacts at any of the big names you can think of.

It seems US tech industry is flying head-first into having giant teams of mid and senior level engineers who don't know how to debug or deliver efficiency within the next five years.

We're failing our juniors, and punishing seniors for having standards.