> Does an intern cost $20/month? Because that’s what Cursor.ai costs.
> Part of being a senior developer is making less-able coders productive, be they fleshly or algebraic.
But do you know what another part of being a senior developer is? Not just making them more productive, but also guiding the junior developers into becoming better, independent, self-tasking, senior coders. And that feedback loop doesn't exist here.
We're robbing ourselves of good future developers, because we aren't even thinking about the fact that the junior devs are actively learning from the small tasks we give them.
Will AI completely replace devs before we all retire? Maybe. Maybe not.
But long before that, the future coders who aren't being hired and trained because a senior dev doesn't understand that the junior devs become senior devs (and that's an important pipeline) and would rather pay $20/month for an LLM, are going to become a major loss/ brain drain domestically.
Almost every senior developer I know is spending that time making LLM's more productive and useful instead.
Whatever you think the job is of the senior developer, it will not be "coding".
I think people need to stop thinking of themselves as computer programmers and start thinking of themselves as _engineers_. Your job isn't writing programs, your job is _using the technology you have available to solve problems_. Maybe that is through writing code, but maybe it's orchestrating LLM's to write code for you. The important part is solving the problem.
LLMs may become more productive/ accurate/ useful, but they're not self-tasking or independent.
> I think people need to stop thinking of themselves as computer programmers and start thinking of themselves as _engineers_. Your job isn't writing programs, your job is _using the technology you have available to solve problems_.
There is a progression of skill required to master any profession, starting with fundamentals, and progressing and developing until you are an expert/ senior at that profession. How is a senior sw dev supposed to become that without writing code? Just reading LLM code and bugfixing isn't the same level or kind of experience. You're going to have devs who can't code by themselves, and that's a bad place to be in.
There are already too many people in IT using tools that they don't understand the workings of (and thus can't troubleshoot, can't replace, can't customize to their env, etc), and this will just exacerbate that x100.
MMW there is going to be a very bad skill deficit in IT in 20 years, which is going to cause an innovation deficit.