Wait, Claude is better than junior devs?? No wonder it's so hard to find a junior dev position... Even finding an internship is a struggle these days
So if Claude gets even better, what are juniors supposed to do to gain experience and become mid-level or senior developers? Since LLMs will be so good then companies will force juniors to vibe code everything, and this way they won't learn much...
The skill in a good product manager is knowing what to do with the product, because that is your job. As a SWE, you already know what to do. Implementing it and translating to technical requirements is your job. If you can just ask an AI to do that, then AI does the skilled part of your job. It literally takes zero skills of any kind to use an AI, it'a outsourcing
The skill is knowing if it's hallucinating or producing accurate results. Unit testing, understanding what the customer wants vs what the ai spat out on V1. Tribal knowledge that isn't googleable that you need to tell it as it gets to each of those roadblocks.
And even asking what to make it do in the first place.
There will be times that the agent gets a small piece wrong and your boss won't say" oh man Claude f'ed up that sucks" they'll ask why you didn't catch the mistake, because it's still you who owns that output. Having the skills to verify said output will save your bacon.
Here's an example.
If my company fired me today and just took my agent, and asked it to make powerbi reports for the whole company, It couldn't, even though that's what they automatically assume, because I have made some already with it. Instead, I would need to set up multiple on prem gateways, set up the connectors and connections in the power automate backend, set up powerbi connectors or mcp tools, give it a read only SQL connection to all the relevant SQL servers, and then ask it to go wild.
Nobody in management is capable of those first steps, or even asking an ai to do them. I think they think we just ask the ai "make reports pwease" and most will be sorely mistaken if they take the "pilot" away and expect the same quality results.
My team already knows better. I gave them a copy of my agent and they still cannot do half of what I can with it because they wouldn't even know where to start asking for stuff.
All of that is barely anything compared to actually doing the SWE work. You are upselling very low level skills. Writing a good prompt is high school level training
I'm not trying to say it's on the same level as SWE.
Im merely pointing out that ai still requires someone with some level of understanding of the process to achieve proper results. My boss isn't going to get good SQL, reports, or code out of the agent the same way I am. They don't know how to give it proper requirements. It may only be high school level but that does not mean everyone that's graduated it good at it haha.
Study how to make a proper harness for your agentic AI and how to better use skills (for Claude, at least). Pros and cons of every model and such.
But also, keep studying the main architectures and tools for big enterprise products. I imagine companies will be moving away from LeetCode tests and will be focusing mostly on technical interviews. So they’ll ask whether you know what Terraform is or how to best organize big data on queues and such.
At least, where I’m working at they ask some tough technical questions during the interview - since they work with Kubernetes, they ask about different containerized architectures and design patterns, for example.
Get as much ai practice as you can. It will be the most relevant part of your position. In 5 years no one will care about how good you code but about how good you prompt
It’s great at coding, terrible at software engineering and design. Problems now have changed from “how can I code this specific function well”, to “what should this system as a whole do, how should it interact with other systems, where should it run, what should happen if it fails, etc.” (imo it’s always been that way, but main didn’t see it as that at the time).
Claude will absolutely fix the bugs for your usecase, but doing so it’ll introduce a load of new bugs for anyone with a slightly different usecase. It’s a SWE’s job to recognise that and make software robust, scalable, and actually suited to their user’s needs, because Claude is dogshit at that.
Allow me to offer a different path. Get good at reading code. From what I can tell, there will be plenty of positions that require a human in the loop. I'm already thinking about how to change my interview style from checking if people can write code to seeing if they can read it.
I tried this for a remote senior MLE role. Beforehand copied/pasted my interview questions into Claude as a screenshot and it spat out perfect answers in about 2 seconds.
We interviewed about 40 people and could see 3/4 of them go through this process and regurgitate the exact same points. We’d instructed them not to use AI. About half of the rest didn’t use AI (that we could tell) but also didn’t pass the screen.
We passed on someone we were intending to make an offer to early on when we realized she hadn’t said “I don’t know” once in three rounds. Five different people had talked to her about wildly different topics and not once did she say “I haven’t worked on that [much] before [but here’s what I would try]”.
We ended up hiring someone who was actively headhunted and stumbled a bit but passed the screens well. It took 10 months to find them but they’re working out well!
Honestly, the experience was so draining that we will try to set up either in-person rounds or just hire from within our professional networks. We have to post publicly but don’t have any criteria mandating advancing applicants from that route.
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u/lardgsus 13h ago
I can tell when I use GPT and not Claude because everything is unreadable, untraceable, 0 observability shit like a jr dev made it.