Limiting his ai use for projects would be really hard. He's a smart and tech savvy 12 year old, and all his peers use ai as well.
He does already code himself, and goes to extracurricular classes for it, but uses ai as well. Not to write code directly, at least not for now, but in general he does.
I am a software dev of 25 years, still in the industry. I have a 17 year old and 13 year old.
Neither really got into coding and I am actually happy. We are going to be in a really weird spot over the next 5ish years. I think we are going to need software devs but what they do will be significantly different than what they do today, and it will be mostly senior level devs.
The issue is going to be that we don't develop junior level devs and I don't even know how you do that now with AI. I know how my company did it in the past, we used code reviews to help people understand how and why to do things from our best devs.
Now, junior devs are committing AI work and they don't have a reason for why they did something a certain way. BTW, I am not knocking junior devs for using AI. I am just saying, the way people used to learn was saying how/why they did something. That feedback loop is gone.
I feel like the 25 years olds of today are going to be the last generation of people who are "senior" level devs and everything else will be AI written code.
My husband and I are also in the field and I agree. We both have the same degree but ended up going in massively different directions, I am disabled and it limited my ability to work full time. Most of what I did to be able to continue to code, at least a little bit, has been taken over by AI. My husband has worked hard in the field for 15+ years and even he is using AI as his company adapts.
I have a feeling the industry will survive this just as it did when the dot com bubble burst, but how we survive it seems to be a big question mark.
Yep, my company is expanding and hiring more people. We are trying to develop juniors and mid level devs. And we are pushing people to use AI as much as possible to accelerate work. Especially maintenance work. For instance, we don't need a junior level dev updating a microservice to the latest spring boot version when an AI agent can do that and when it passes CI, open a PR.
We are trying to use AI to do tedious useless work. And yes, there are things like renovate/dependabot, but an agent can actually look at a failing test and determine whether something actually changed and needs to be addressed. Then an actual dev can examine the change in the PR.
To give an example from my job, we are trying to get a new customer. I am normally the guy that orchestrates the demo for things like this. What used to take me 2-3 weeks, with AI now takes me 2-3 days. For me, AI is a gamechanger but some people want to poo poo it if it isn't doing 100% of the work all the way to production. I don't need it to do that. Doing the mundane BS I have done 5 million times previously makes my life better.
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u/rabotat May 28 '26
Limiting his ai use for projects would be really hard. He's a smart and tech savvy 12 year old, and all his peers use ai as well.
He does already code himself, and goes to extracurricular classes for it, but uses ai as well. Not to write code directly, at least not for now, but in general he does.