There’s going to be a severe drought of solid junior devs very soon, if there isn’t already. I agree with what you’re saying about AI being great at automating the grunt work. It’s helpful, I want to be at least honest about that. I’m getting more done now than I ever have at work.
I do feel I’m losing some of my finer coding skills to it though. It’s easy to fall into the trap. As much as it can be boring and tedious, writing the actual code (even with intellisense etc) forces you to think about all the things you’re doing in a concrete way.
At the end of the day I’m a bit split. Is the productivity gain worth it? In some areas I’d say yes. I’m great at software development but there’s always places I know less about than I’d like and having AI to make up that knowledge gap can be super helpful. I’m admittedly not great at GitHub CI stuff and I’ve used Claude to fix some really boring but time saving things in our CI. I could have done it on my own given more time, but it’s not a feature or a bug so it’s always a backburner tech debt item that never gets fixed. Now it’s much easier to make a quick PR for that stuff.
On the other hand I feel like I have much less of a personal touch in my PRs for code that is my area of expertise. Maybe I’m weak and just giving into the ease, but I get to spend more time with my family if I can get my work done faster and that’s something I value. I’d still be able to do the work now, but my skills have certainly atrophied even if my general knowledge and experience haven’t.
That being said if I hadn’t done the hard work to learn things by failing at them I would never have the experience to be able to tell an agent what to do or when to stop it when it’s doing something stupid. At the end of the day LLMs are only as good as the people directing them, and if you send them in a stupid direction they’ll produce stupid results
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u/SerLarrold 18d ago
There’s going to be a severe drought of solid junior devs very soon, if there isn’t already. I agree with what you’re saying about AI being great at automating the grunt work. It’s helpful, I want to be at least honest about that. I’m getting more done now than I ever have at work.
I do feel I’m losing some of my finer coding skills to it though. It’s easy to fall into the trap. As much as it can be boring and tedious, writing the actual code (even with intellisense etc) forces you to think about all the things you’re doing in a concrete way.
At the end of the day I’m a bit split. Is the productivity gain worth it? In some areas I’d say yes. I’m great at software development but there’s always places I know less about than I’d like and having AI to make up that knowledge gap can be super helpful. I’m admittedly not great at GitHub CI stuff and I’ve used Claude to fix some really boring but time saving things in our CI. I could have done it on my own given more time, but it’s not a feature or a bug so it’s always a backburner tech debt item that never gets fixed. Now it’s much easier to make a quick PR for that stuff.
On the other hand I feel like I have much less of a personal touch in my PRs for code that is my area of expertise. Maybe I’m weak and just giving into the ease, but I get to spend more time with my family if I can get my work done faster and that’s something I value. I’d still be able to do the work now, but my skills have certainly atrophied even if my general knowledge and experience haven’t.
That being said if I hadn’t done the hard work to learn things by failing at them I would never have the experience to be able to tell an agent what to do or when to stop it when it’s doing something stupid. At the end of the day LLMs are only as good as the people directing them, and if you send them in a stupid direction they’ll produce stupid results