Heard a senior dev say 'AI will replace junior devs' and I think that's backwards

I was sitting in a meetup in Austin last Tuesday when a guy with 15 years experience said AI tools mean companies won't need to hire junior coders anymore. He got a bunch of nods but I think he's got it totally wrong. If anything, AI makes it easier for juniors to ramp up fast by handling the grunt work, so companies should hire more of them not less. Has anyone else seen AI actually help junior devs get better faster instead of pushing them out?

3 comments

3 Comments

emery1014d ago

Juniors are literally the ones training the AI right now by reviewing its output and fixing mistakes. If anything that makes them more valuable because they're building the dataset that the senior devs will be relying on.

wader7114d ago

Feels like people get all worked up over the next big thing in tech... it's just a tool at the end of the day. Juniors still need to learn the ropes somehow.

jordan_henderson1314d ago

Yeah and pretty soon we'll have AI grading the AI's homework while the junior is out getting coffee. The whole thing is just a loop of everyone pretending they know what's happening. At this rate we'll skip "learning the ropes" and go straight to "learning how to prompt the rope learning simulator.