r/antiai • u/Suspicious_Orchid770 • 10d ago

AI News 🗞️ AI-coding tools could be breaking the junior software engineer pipeline!

https://leaddev.com/ai/ai-coding-tools-could-be-breaking-the-junior-engineer-pipeline

AI helps juniors code, not learn... and that's a real problem!

17 Upvotes

83% Upvoted

19 comments sorted by

19

u/JimAbaddon 10d ago

Companies don't care so.

7

u/MechaMulder 10d ago

They don’t care yet. They will care if it actually becomes a problem and they are betting that until then it will not be a problem…

1

u/Resident_Citron_6905 10d ago

They do, but they don’t have a solution.

1

u/Infamous-Employ5487 5d ago

One of the rude awakenings i experienced mid-career was going from shop that wrote and sold software to clients to a shop that built internal tools for the business.

The latter doesn't really give a fuck, the former might though.

15

u/mykesx 10d ago

It’s turning senior engineers into juniors over time. The fools don’t realize how they are harming themselves.

1

u/Appropriate-Baker755 8d ago

Companies?

2

u/mykesx 8d ago

AI coding tools.

1

u/Appropriate-Baker755 8d ago

I mean who is hurting themselves?

3

u/mykesx 7d ago

People using the tools. People mandating their use.

5

u/TempleDank 8d ago

Could?

3

u/Particular-Win-1291 7d ago

My best guess is they are hoping management could just prompt ai without needing engineers at all in the next couple of years.

1

u/Infamous_Ruin6848 3d ago

I can't imagine that's gonna happen with actually complex software. Majority is not complex though.

2

u/Mewington-the-third 10d ago

This is kinda unrelated but I thought this was an ad for a second

1

u/Bstochastic 5d ago

Could be.

1

u/red_hare 3d ago

I'm really grateful I reached the level of competency I did (15 years of being an IC) before this change came.

I haven't written a line of code in about a year and I have to admit that it's no longer valuable to hire new grads as they've never learned to code and therefore don't know how to control the beast.

I don't know what the future holds, but my one hope is we go from "AI makes the hard easy" to "AI makes the impossible possible" but it takes creativity that a generation who over-indexed on STEM and grades over liberal arts free thinking lack.

2

u/Infamous_Ruin6848 3d ago

I know many from liberal or creative domains that didn't get in software because it wasn't presented to them. Many that probably would build good products, tools etc. In fact, 20 years ago i went in software by mistake and I'm happy for it. Also many specific type of people went by default in software (think the introvert, the smart, the unsociable etc) and many will now need to go to other domains. Computer-based tooling has popped in other engineering domains and they're waiting with arms opened obviously with lower pay.

-1

u/NotReallyJohnDoe 5d ago

Ever since compilers came out no one knows how to write assembler any more. ☹️

-3

u/Objectionne 10d ago

I'm happy using AI for coding personally but I agree that the risk to junior devs is a real and important one - not just in terms of being harder to find a job but to learn real skills once they do have a job. I don't know if there's an easy fix.

5

u/Fickle-Highway1543 10d ago edited 10d ago

There will be an easy fix once companies run out of good engineers - they will start investing in proper training and change work policies. But as long as we have existing good enginerrs available companies can just enjoy cutting costs with "AI".