zlacker

> 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. Using agents well is both a both a skill and an engineering project all its own, of prompts, indices, and (especially) tooling. LLMs only produce shitty code if you let them.

A junior developer often has negative value to a team, because they're sapping the time of more senior developers who have to help train them, review code, fix mistakes, etc. It can take a long while to break even.

The raw cost of Cursor's subscription is surely dwarfed by your own efforts, given that description. The actual calculous here should be the cost to corral Cursor, against the value of the code it generated.

>>nitwit+(OP)
So what is the end game here, we don't have any juniors? That's what we're celebrating? This whole thing makes no damn sense, we're just becoming more efficient at producing bad code at scale, which will be maintained by a workforce that is growing less proficient at that with the increasing adoption of AI - skills will decline and eventually we'll be living with more buggy software, maintained by underpaid, unappreciated and overwhelmed grey beards and it will be too late to turn back.

>>fud101+0r1
I had a call with a recruiter the other day, who told me that they had simply stopped hiring juniors at all, when not too long ago they would be camping out at colleges on graduation day to snipe fresh graduates.

This is going to a problem real soon. There needs to be a realistic career path for software developers, or the entire field is at risk.

>>fud101+0r1
This. No more juniors, and the skills of the seniors is going to atrophy when all they're doing is review and "move around" code an LLM spat out.

>>nitwit+(OP)
I don't think that's necessarily true. Some companies and seniors certainly invest into training and mentoring their juniors and this can take a long time and be expensive. But there are a lot of places offer 3-6 months internships for people that are barely out of high school. Others heavily rely on overseas contractors. So in a lot of scenarios it does seem possible to use less capable labor in a beneficial way for software engineering.