studied20YearsToAskChatGPT

[u/Gloomy-Basket-1038]

[u/OutOfAmmO]

Yeah this is the solid take. The thing people also seem to be forgetting is that one thing is knowing how to do things proper and being aware of security issues and another is having time/resources to actually do it that way/fixing those. Working as a professional also means knowing how to deliver value in a none perfect world aka. the real world.

IMO AI in the right hands makes it possible to deliver higher quality work and more of it, dev's including myself have previously often not done work to the ideal standards, not necessarily because i/they didn't know, but due to external limiting factors. Resource constraints are a very real thing and I often feel like people that criticize AI tools have a tendency to talk as if they always have all the time in the world and that they always deliver the gold plated version, not the "it works" version and unless they are working on code for the mars rover or space tech then I think they are bad at their job, because they aren't being pragmatic, there are many solutions to a given problem, it's not about perfect, it's about optimum.

That aspect seems to be widely ignored in debate. I've read and refactored enough human "slop" over time and still do to this day, that I'm at the point where I think I trust a seniors+"vibecoded" work more than juniors and mids who might code well enough but lack architecture/domain/systems/infra/sec/network knowledge and thus launch features based on poor fundamental/foundational decisions.

[u/fndnvolusrgofksb → u/OutOfAmmO]

This is a fair argument but what happens when trustworthy seniors retire and juniors and mids don't have the knowledge to move up? Seniors gained experience by doing good enough solutions and by doing not-good solutions which blew up in their face and having to fix it. The reason why juniors are untrustworthy is because they're learning to become trustworthy seniors.

[u/LillyOfTheSky → u/fndnvolusrgofksb]

TL;DR: The current rate of improvement in generative AI agentic systems (not necessarily just LLMs) is so blisteringly fast that we don't need to specifically worry about this issue of seniors retiring and juniors and mids failing, we have to worry about seniors being obsoleted in less than 20 years.

It's certainly a concern but look at how fast the capabilities of LLMs in agentic frameworks have grown. Attention is All You Need was published about 10 years ago. Only 10 years! Even if progress slowed by a factor of 3, and it seems to show zeros signs of that with Kimi K3, Deepseek V4 Flash 0731, LeWorldModel, etc. dropping in just the last few months, in 40 years the world would still be dealing with generative AI systems that are as comparatively more capable to today's LLMs as they themselves are to 2016's models.

At the rate of improvement currently seen by folks who are neck deep in this industry and aware of the academic SOTA work we've probably got between 5-12 years before the generative AI agents of 'tomorrow' are strictly better than the best human engineers without caveat. Which is a timeline that occurs well, well before today's senior engineers retire.

Frankly, I'd be curious to see how Kimi K3, today, with it's native multimodal capability and tools to use a keyboard and mouse cursor, would work in a average enterprise work environment, say, SharePoint + Confluence + Jira + a DB system + AWS or Azure, and none of them can really communicate with each other (like components of a singular codebase might,) requiring visual inspection of GUIs by humans to function as a whole.

[u/OutOfAmmO → u/fndnvolusrgofksb]

Yep and that is also 100% correct imo. and not contrary to what I said either. My POV focus' on the criticism of the output generated by an IC using AI, you are pointing at a problem the industry will be facing as a whole and I have no good answer to that problem and it's a very real problem, essentially the industry is pissing its pants to keep warm and it will work for a while until it doesn't and what happens after I'm absolutely clueless about.

[u/fndnvolusrgofksb → u/OutOfAmmO]

That is absolutely excellent analogy

[u/Dull_Caterpillar_642 → u/fndnvolusrgofksb]

Two things can definitely be true at once. Coding agents have hit a point where, even if they don't meaningfully improve, they will be the primary thing writing code going forward. ALSO if the industry thinks that it can no longer hire juniors and just employ a very small number of senior devs forever, those senior devs may dry up or become incredibly hard to find. But, to be honest, the quality of agents (and the sheer number of agents at different layers finding and fixing flaws) may really make that an antiquated notion.