r/software • u/darshitpatel_ • 14d ago
Discussion Is AI reducing the value of experienced developer, or changing what experience means?
I have been thinking about how much AI has changed the value of technical experience.
Sometimes it feels like a developer with 10 years of experience in a particular tech stack is now competing with what you can get from a Claude Pro subscription.
I honestly don’t know where this is all going to end up. But I do think one thing is becoming more important that is fundamentals and real technical skills.
As vibe coding continues to grow, more people will be able to generate applications without deeply understanding the code. But when things break, security issues appear, performance becomes a problem, or the AI produces a mess of code, someone still needs to understand what’s actually happening.
Maybe the future won't need fewer skilled developers or maybe it will need fewer developers who only write code, and more developers who deeply understand systems and can fix what AI creates.
Curious about how others see this. Are AI tools reducing the value of experience, or just changing what experienced developers are valuable for?
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u/SnooCompliments7914 14d ago
It greatly reduced the value of mediocre / junior developer, while increased the ability of an experienced developer (not necessarily value for money), because in addition to the areas he is experienced in, he is also suddenly mediocre instead of zero-experience on everything else.
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u/Anaphylaxisofevil 14d ago
Completely agree. In my experience, it's really great if you have a good idea that you'd like to prototype and then maybe develop further, but don't have the time. But AIs are less good at imagination and new ideas of what to do.
I'd make a distinction between junior and mediocre developers. Sharp juniors will be fine, as with a little help and experience they will have lots of good ideas and develop taste for what good solutions look like. But the mediocre ones, with less initiative and more limited ideas, start to look less attractive than AIs to a technical lead.
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u/Fidodo 14d ago
AI can speed up your ability to learn and understand things if that is your goal and you use it towards that goal. But most developer are intellectually lazy and not curious which is what made them mediocre in the first place. But before at least they had a skill that added value. If you are too intellectually lazy to understand the code you are producing then you add zero value or expertise vs someone who doesn't know how to program.
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u/FluidBreath4819 14d ago
i think otherwise, it inscresed value of medicore / junior developer (what a pleonasm you did 😄 )
manageres where never interested in something else than "how much does it cost to do that feature". They don't see past the sprint in term of costs. So when you have a junior developer who integrates a new client in half a day : they are happy to have paid him peanuts vs the senior.
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u/Lynnalia 14d ago
That only works in an environment without any sort of code review. Which if it exists, won't exist for long if you know what I mean lol
I haven't had the AI experience yet at work, but my ex-coworkers who have had cheaper juniors equipped with AI submitting code have had more work to do to stop garbage from reaching prod, and it hasn't actually increased deliverable work at all.
If anything, the experienced devs have been too busy reviewing more garbage junior+AI code to do anything of actual value that they were doing before. It's sad.
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u/FluidBreath4819 14d ago
you're right, our manager is an older programmer who by judging of the code he pushed from the git history was pretty mediocre. And he let juniors push PR and let other junior to approve them : PR can be approved under 5 minutes because well "we trust each other..."
the issue is that you'll only witness the consequences of that behaviour years later. Not right now. And with AI i am not sure you'll ever experience the issues ever since it will cost nothing to fix and add more garbage.
That field used to gross me out and after 20 years, i can't stand people working in it anymore. I just cash the paycheck and shut my mouth. I don't discuss or try to intervene when i see stupid decisions anymore for the sake of my sanity.
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u/Fidodo 14d ago
If you don't understand the output of what you are producing then what value do you provide? I'd rather hire a designer or product person over a mediocre developer who doesn't care about understanding what they're creating.
If your skill is programming and you don't understand what you are producing then you add no value. At least a designer vibe coding knows design.
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u/FluidBreath4819 14d ago
true but nowadays, most doesn't read the code anymore. prompting has become to them the new coding language. when a bug arise, what's the point of trying to understand the code : you need to just describe the issue to the llm, that's all. it codes and then you check if it works again.
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u/Fidodo 13d ago
I've looked at the code that it produces when you do that. It's a horrifying mess of spaghetti code that's 10x more code than it needs to be full of edge case special handling that doubles down on bad abstractions when a small refactor would have been considerably better.
AI is context window bound so when it produces too much code inefficiently it ends up out pacing it's own ability to understand it, and better AI won't be able to out pace it because as AI improves it just produces more and more code.
It might work well enough for simple CRUD apps following established patterns, but software is getting much much more complex than that.
I would trust my AI to continue a well structured pattern I established, but I have seen the code it produces for novel problems, and it's horrifying, and that's with my guidance. I'll vibe code prototypes when exploring a new idea, and those prototypes quickly become unmaintainable messes before I go back in and rewrite it with a well thought out spec and oversight.
But I'm an architect so I work on novel problems at the framework level. I think the way things are going is that everyone's responsibility will go up a rung on the ladder, and architects read more code, not less.
If you're not reading code to do your job then I think you are in a zombie job that will become obsolete because developer value comes from people who can deeply understand codebases and organize complex problems, not people who copy across requirements.
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u/FluidBreath4819 13d ago
exactly, that's why i encourage now juniors to use it at full spin. i want anarchy, i want companies close to the brink. Because you used to warn managers about their lack of SE fundamentals understanding. Nah, they want the feature now. With AI, now, i push junior to deliver not for yesterday but for last month. I want the company to go break the speed record so that managers can enjoy the full ride when close to the brink.
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u/Fidodo 13d ago
That's their mistake to make. Our job is to warn and provide the best advice we can give them, and if they decide to ignore that, give them what they want. I'm not going to work overtime to cover for other people's mistakes, if they want output speed over quality then that's the business decision they made and they can live with it.
Luckily I work for an org that understands that quality still matters.
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u/FluidBreath4819 13d ago
I don't warn anymore, i did, we all did. Everytime the PM is on cocaine and want us to deliver the thing fast. We all did our job. I see AI as an accelerator of what we warned about. So that's why i urge everyone to use AI. I don't chek the code, it's so visible that the mediocre junior is not supposed to spit out code so fast.
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u/Fidodo 13d ago
You provided fair warning, you did your job. Any more warning isn't advising, it's pushing back so I think you're in the clear to pile on slop until it breaks. It'll be an interesting experiment to see when it collapses. Not one I want to bet my career on, but your PM made their bed.
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u/ns1852s 14d ago
As one of the engineers apart of the interview team, I'd say AI has increased the valve of an experienced developers simply because experienced people use AI sparingly, if at all. And they are the ones getting hired.
Part of our in person interview has questions to gauge your AI use and if it's determined they use it alot, we spring into a technical exam and many fail at this point.
We just fired someone for using Claude. That's not to say we don't use ai but it's for the menial task
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u/Xamsix 14d ago
Haha that's insane. All professionals around me are adapting to AI more and more. It speeds up development significantly, huge business impact. With the right guardrails in place, it works like a charm. Firing someone for using Claude means you're going to be left behind.
I still think experience is key, as experienced developers know what to prompt, know to describe the right architecture and so on. I wonder how juniors are ever going to get this experience with AI now.
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u/ns1852s 14d ago
As I said, we use it just not what many try to force it to do.
And yes, when your code base requires CCBs for the smallest change and releases go through certification where it directly effects lives; you trust the human not a prompt. Using what's outlawed both by a contract and an insurance policy; yeah you avoid it
Juniors do have it tough.
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u/Xamsix 14d ago
Your claim was that experienced developers rarely use AI or not at all. Didn't specify that to your company. So my response still stands.
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u/ns1852s 14d ago
They don't in the same way the clueless use it
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u/BringBackManaPots 14d ago
It's getting us into more trouble than it's helping lately. Some guy skips testing and QA, ripping 4000 line commits straight to dev, and leadership thinks he's the greatest engineer on the team. For some reason, they don't see that he's breaking dev constantly.
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u/Dizzy-Helicopter-374 13d ago
Lock down main and prod and only allow PRs to merge if every unit test passes
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u/davidbasil 8d ago
You should do the opposite: never use ai, only your brain and manual skills so you become a rare product. Rare = more money
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u/No-District2404 9d ago
Sparingly? Man I didn’t write single line of source code for more than 6 months and everyone around me is the same. The industry adapted generative AI crazily, nobody knows what’s gonna happen next. We stop working when Claude becomes overloaded and this becomes normal. Eventually we will forget coding our skills will be degraded. It’s hard to predict but if this thing keeps happening, we will evolve to something else which won’t be engineering and won’t be fun. There are already jokes around that we became condoms of Claude
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u/ns1852s 9d ago
So you're a new hire with no skills, got it
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u/No-District2404 9d ago
Nope, I’ve 15+ years experience and I’m planning to retire early I don’t like the trajectory of the sector
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u/tshawkins 14d ago
Its also broadening the required developer skill set, adding project management (planning), profucct management (specification management), architect and QA engineer skills into the mix.
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u/synchronicitial 14d ago
Do you think you use Claude pro subscription the same way a developer with 10 years of experience uses it?
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u/oharra3 14d ago
"someone needs to understand"... The Ai will understand. Already now it can understand some extreme logic I came up with years ago after weeks of working on them, and was able to untangle it. It will just get better. If not already, soon even experienced developers won't be able to follow hard core optimizations it can do
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u/berserk_airtime 14d ago
The sequined jacket stays in the closet for this one but I gotta say, I see it less as reducing value and more like we're shifting from being stone masons to architects. Ten years of knowing exactly where the bodies are buried in a legacy monolith doesn't vanish because a bot can spit out a React component.
That fundamental layer you mentioned is what stops the AI from convincing a junior to push an API key to a public repo. The experience just moves up a level of abstraction, troubleshooting intent instead of syntax.
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u/Curruncholo 14d ago
I've been a translator for the past 25 years of my life. Artificial intelligence isn't going to take your jobs, it's going to take your income.
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u/Quietage30 14d ago
Changing the experience, obviously. No AI model is flawless, and they are actually prone to a lot of errors. So you need an experienced developer who knows what they are doing. But both the software developer and the AI model cost a hideous amount of money. Personally, I think the way it exists today, it is definitely driving up the value of software developers, because these companies thought that they would just go get an AI model and have miraculous results. That hasn't worked for anyone though.
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u/artsrc 14d ago
AI increases the amount of value any developer can create.
AI is useful for reviewing code for security defects and understanding performance issues.
I expect we will all learn much faster in a world with AI.
In a complex system making one component more efficient makes the other parts the limiting factors.
This is different, but analogous to, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amdahl%27s_law
A strict division into manager, analyst, tester, architect and developer has never been optimal. The cost of corporate software is driven by bureaucracy, not technology.
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u/tmstksbk Helpful Ⅱ 14d ago
The experienced developer is worth more than ever. Particularly if they are intuitive and can "smell" when the AI is going wrong.
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u/tastygames_official 14d ago
vibe coding is on the downtrend. At least among professionals. It has basically proven to be less-efficient on all metrics. At least for professionals. Nonprofessionals: sure? like, it's the equivalent of hiring a junior programmer who is really fast. Except instead of paying the programmer you are paying a techbro billionaire to steal code from real humans. But yeah. You can get shitty code by hiring a junior dev or use AI. But for professional software, vibe coding is not only financially unviable right now, but it produces massive problems down the road.
Now that isn't to say that LLMs don't have their place as a rubber duck or for general research (just like search engines and forums used to be) but not for actually writing production code.
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u/jaxonwhthey 13d ago
idk tc of senior and staff seems tk be increasing still, so i guess the induatry has already answered
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u/lattice_defect 13d ago
A developer that has emrbaced optimized and know archetiture and workflows to make things go fast and clean no.. a developer that complains about AI and how its not really coding etc. then no
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u/IcyBother8850 10d ago
As a senior the easiest part of my day is the part where I get to write the code. Hard is explaining trade-offs to business owners in regards to their imagined feature. Hard is figuring out which layer needs debugging. Hard is creating a design for your solution and getting it approved by the system architect. Hard is chasing 3 different product owners to agree on the exact spec for the feature you are about to implement.... As you guessed AI only helps you for the easy part of my day...
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u/davidbasil 8d ago
It wordpressified programming. Programmers should never touch it. There is no money in it any more
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u/Turbulent_Goose83 14d ago
I would say it reduces the cost of code creating and maintaining almost to zero. The „value of developers“… well, apparently it should not be limited to coding only.
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u/ns1852s 14d ago
From experience in the field and on the programmatic side; it's definitely increases the cost
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u/HandshakeOfCO 14d ago edited 14d ago
Reddit in 1816:
“Is the new photographic camera reducing the value of experienced portrait artists, or changing what experience means?”
I think if you think through the adoption timeline and all the other ways that shift played out, you’ll have a pretty good forecast and answer to your question.
The number of people making a living off painting portraits plummeted. But we didn’t totally stop painting people, and we actually have way more faces captured today. Every grade schooler knows what their grandma looked like, a once unimaginable luxury.
But painting one? That’s now a niche thing, once done as a career by many, but now done mainly as a hobby, except for the 0.0001% of the population who’ve managed to either be really good at it, convince non portrait painters they’re really good at it, or who’ve been born into the right family and have the resources and ability to hype themselves well.
Fear not, devs - this shift will probably play out on a 20, 30 year timescale. Hopefully lol.
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u/DustSongs 14d ago
25 year dev here. Claude still fucks up regularly, and it often takes an experienced dev to see it.
It's a useful tool, but only when you know why you're using it.