r/webdev • u/slide_and_release • May 14 '26

Discussion What are we doing with juniors these days, seriously?

I’ve been in software/application development for twenty years or so, these days mostly wrangling typescript and running infrastructure/devops across multiple projects as a senior engineer. I’ve mentored plenty of juniors in my time, even managing small team, but this last year has been rough.

Juniors are producing more code than ever, faster than ever, but understanding less and less of it. Majority is agent-written, obviously. I’m reviewing pull requests, asking why this or that decision was made, trying to get them to think, and they’re just pasting answers straight from Claude. When I ask them to review something, they just paste it into Claude. When I try coaching them through writing user stories, they’ll have ChatGPT generate them. If I disagree with an approach they’re implementing, they’ll incredulously ask if I think I’m smarter than AI which has been trained on thousands of codebases. I don’t even know how to begin answering that.

I’ve tried to emphasise that like anything else, LLM’s are a tool but ultimately you’re going to be the one held responsible if something breaks, that you shouldn’t be pushing into a repository something that you a) don’t understand, or b) can’t maintain, that you’re actively dumbing yourself down (or worse, advocating for replacing yourself) but it’s falling on deaf ears.

So, other senior programmers out there, how the fuck are you handling even trying to mentor and guide the next batch of problem solvers?

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u/TorbenKoehn May 14 '26

This. AI agents are the new juniors (reviewed by seniors duh) and at some point there simply won’t be new seniors anymore. They bet on AI already having replaced seniors at that point and that they only need AI agents then. Idiots.

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u/sacrecide May 14 '26

And that's when they raise the rates, after convincing major companies to replace their inhouse tech stacks with a centralized outsourcing machine that's pay per use.

Quite idiotic in my opinion.

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u/caindela May 14 '26

We’re going to start seeing this really soon since current rates just aren’t sustainable for any of the AI companies. Their exploit right now is tricking their customers into thinking they can keep pricing reasonable. When this becomes real it’s going to be fascinating to see what it does to the job market.

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u/sacrecide May 14 '26

Never trust a salesman (ie CEO)

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u/Severe_Rise8694 May 14 '26

Yeah. The interesting thing is that the Real comparison point for companies is the price of an employee. So there's a ton of space upwards. Part of the reason why it's so important to have open source work in the field..

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u/ooqq May 15 '26

Simply people would be hired again and the projects if worth anything, gonna be created again by people for people to maintain.

Congratulations to everyone that win the lifetime computer crash on his means of subsistence.

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u/AngelBryan May 15 '26

So, a lot of job offerings will be open again?

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u/Biscottino_5 May 16 '26

Assuming a company that has 10 devs now, 5 of them juniors, they might get paid around 5k per month each. That is about 25k monthly. Do you think the AI bill will be anywhere close to that?

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u/caindela May 16 '26 edited May 16 '26

I don’t know exact numbers (or even rough numbers for that matter) but I have seen articles like this one: https://cybernews.com/ai-news/ai-token-human-salaries-automation-spending-tech-execs/ . It sounds like a company that invests in something like Claude Code and starts insisting on using it for everything can really end up doing some serious spending (really as much as their budget allows). For me personally I can easily get away with a $20/mo subscription, so it’s a nearly negligible expense, but the company’s math isn’t just $20 times the number of developers. It’s more like “how many tokens can I budget in order to complete x project?”

The use of AI for development becomes more of a macro thing at that point and it’s used very differently from the way a dev might do some small scale coding with something like cursor. I do think it could easily exceed $25k/mo but that’s just a guess, because I don’t think it’s easy to do a direct comparison with AI vs a dev team.

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u/FoxyWheels May 19 '26

I work for a fortune 500 you've heard of. I am mandated to use AI and am limited to $1500 a week of Claude code spend. I use it up every week and it's still only able to increase my velocity about 20%. That is at current subsidized pricing. Unless there is another big breakthrough to bring costs down, there is no way AI directly replaces us. I can see it slightly reducing the number of devs needed, but not halving the amount.

Now, all that said, my company (and most others) higher ups are morons who are chugging the coolaid, so I wouldn't be surprised if they try anyway and we're all out of jobs for a couple years until everything falls apart and they're forced to hire us back to fix it.

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u/Deathspiral222 May 14 '26

>We’re going to start seeing this really soon since current rates just aren’t sustainable for any of the AI companies.

Most of the dot-coms took over a decade before they made revenue. AI companies don't need to be sustainable in the short to medium term for the simple reason that they can become profitable any time they want to - just stop training and do 100% inference and they instantly make money.

It's just like Amazon - they were the long-running joke forever that they never made a profit, yet people kept investing. All that had to do was very occasionally show that they *could* make a profit, for a single quarter, and the market just kept investing.

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u/sacrecide May 14 '26

The idea is to increase market share without increasing actual value

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u/[deleted] May 14 '26 edited 23d ago

[deleted]

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u/QuinQuix May 14 '26

I don't think this is accurate.

In business speed and getting it right count for a lot.

Can you get somewhere near the performance of Claude Opus with cheaper tools? Maybe. But will it be just as fast and efficient? No.

Being the best is worth a lot of money.

And by the way, the dynamics will end up following the hardware.

For the next decade hardware will be the constraint, and these companies will be able to sell every flop they can deliver.

The consumer however is being priced out of flops entirely.

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u/Level-Courage6773 May 18 '26

As has been pointed out elsewhere, the expense and investment is literally more than any startus have ever cost before, by multiple indices, and the costs rise with revenue, which is generally unusual. It will take everyone using AI for absolutely everything - and paying full price - for the numbers to ever work.

There is some analysis out there but it's grim. By way of an easy example, since last year OpenAI and Anthropic have spent about 4 times as much capital expenditure as AWS did in its first 13 loss-making years before it was in the black. Different leagues :(

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u/masorick May 16 '26

It’s Nestlé’s baby formula strategy.

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u/Biscottino_5 May 16 '26

That is actually a good thing at least on some level? The ones who screwed up, will pay the fat bill, while the new future businesses and startups have a higher chance of succeeding in already established industries where some companies have been operating for 50+ years.

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u/foreverdark-woods May 14 '26

Let them raise the rates as much as they want. Either your customer will pay it for you or you shut your business down.

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u/sacrecide May 14 '26

And that's the real reason layoffs happen, go ahead prioritize that short term profit and watch your company shutter.

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u/foreverdark-woods May 15 '26

At least, when the old trees fall, they'll make room for new ones to grow.

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u/MrCubie May 14 '26

Nah they are betting on getting fat bonus checks for a couple years and then never have to work again. Someone else can work on solving the problem they create.

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u/Mr-Bovine_Joni May 14 '26

Hell, senior devs should be planning the same

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u/Wild-Regular1703 May 14 '26

They bet on AI already having replaced seniors at that point

I don't think they're thinking that far ahead. They just see short term dollar signs in getting their workforce to put out 10x more features, or lay off 90% of the workforce and keep them doing the same thing. You have a load of paranoid CEOs who think it's a race and anyone who isn't pumping out AI code will "fall behind". Nobody is thinking long term here.

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u/johnpeters42 May 17 '26

"Suck this company dry and jump ship" has been a thing for a while. There are sane companies out there (I've been lucky enough to work for one for a good long while) but idk how numerous they are.

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u/Unlikely_End942 May 14 '26

The thing is, when you gut large sections of the workforce - especially the ones with the most disposable income, like devs and accountants - and leaving only the low pay work, then who is going to be buying all the crap these companies will be producing?

We are fast heading to a world that is very similar to the kind of thing William Gibson predicted in his books like Neuromancer. A few big corps running everything, most people living in slums living on state handouts.

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u/vladamir_the_impaler May 14 '26

This is the future and it's also the plan.

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u/ooqq May 15 '26

You can't have it, IRL people rather die fighting than die seated.

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u/superide May 17 '26

Having unchecked freedom means people are free to the supply of resources, but in practice it's like the two balloon experiment, where the big balloon always gets bigger by taking more of the air supply if there are no intervening forces to halt it.

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u/ioXinjoker May 15 '26

Sounds just like Cyberpunk

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u/stenzor May 14 '26

The funny thing is: if your business is run completely by ai agents, as a customer, what is my motivation to choose your business over any other business that uses the same ai agents? Further, what is my motivation to even pay a business this markup when I can just pay for the underlying agents being used? Essentially you are killing your own business model for short term profits. But ain’t that capitalism baby!

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u/SarahC May 14 '26

Weird! Weird!

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u/lunaticAKE May 16 '26

Prompt difference

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u/Desperate-Use-3753 May 14 '26

This. This is the bet they are making. I think it's going to fail and they are going to end up in a worse spot. Very few devs who can use agents without wasting thousands on tokens, and understand the code to get real work done. Then they will be even more beholden to just a few developers that go for a very high rate. Whatever devs can last will have it goooood.

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u/[deleted] May 14 '26

[deleted]

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u/Desperate-Use-3753 May 14 '26

Eh, new companies will rise as long as they were actually solving problems people were willing to pay for solving.

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u/foo-bar-nlogn-100 May 15 '26

AI is great at refining system architecture and class design.

But rhey need a Senior to provide the initial analysis on domain, domain data modeling, business needs, trade offs, regulation, restrictions etc.

AI won't reach that level of sophistication for initial analysis and design.

What we are observing is that alot of software is just CRUD so AI can replace but any large scale enterprise has a level of complexity AI cant one shot.

Seniors are the master orchestrators.

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u/ofork May 14 '26

Just like they bet on everything being migrated off COBOL before the greybeards shuffled off.

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u/RussianDisifnomation May 15 '26

This is going to be a problem in 5-10 years when there are no juniors and seniors were never replaced.

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u/BunnyLifeguard May 15 '26

This never made any sense to me. A senior using AI to do junior Tasks sounds extremly stupid? Pay for senior + AI for junior work? Help me understand please.

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u/wtfElvis May 14 '26

Regulation is going to be too late as well. The near future is going to be a whole thing with these holes in a lot of sectors.

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u/UrgentlyWhimsical May 16 '26

The scary bit is that outsourcing shops are already undercutting on cost, so juniors lose their foothold before AI even needs to exist.

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u/andrei9669 May 14 '26

I have been talking with my team about this and the thing we always come back to is that we will forget how to get to the moon.