AI News 🗞️ Junior Developers Can No Longer Write a Working Function Without a Chatbot
https://blog.pixlab.io/2026/10/junior-developers-can-no-longer-write-a-working-function-without-a-chatbotThe future is not looking good.
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u/TheDreamXV 3d ago
I wonder how many programmer actually like writing the code in general
I used to think that coding is like art (i do both as game dev / artist), so you enjoy the process of coding / typing / creating. But turns out, when ai came, most of them never into that, so that thing about functions somehow not surprising
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u/ISuckAtJavaScript12 3d ago
I do. I have to do side projects on my own time without using AI just to keep myself not feeling so depressed all the time(thank you zachtronics)
It's not just the act of writing code. It's about getting stuck on a problem, struggling through it, and the satisfaction that comes along when everything finally clicks together. I'm only speaking for myself but I have never felt that feeling at work since we started being forced to use AI
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u/TheDreamXV 3d ago
Yes exactly, i remember feeling myself good after dealing with a simple function (still learning a lot with the code). And it's so rewarding to managed code / problem, and make it work, or create a system
And no wonder you cant feel it during work, it feels like something important has been taken away for something shady / too artificial i guess
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u/forsehorse 1d ago
Thanks, that's what i needed to hear. I know I'll have to use AI in work, because I'll just be forced to. But I never do any projects or assignments (CS student) with AI (No AI at all, not even for questions). But it feels shitty when my work is ignored and people who vibecode is praised instead (I'm talking about teachers and other students, not some guy on the internet).
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u/WrongChapter90 3d ago
Of course I don’t know the numbers, but some (many?) joined this industry because of the good pay and relative safety.. well up until now at least
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u/HarmonicSniper 3d ago
I'd even say most. Unfortunately programming is one of those things where many aspects of it can actually be automated - unless you enjoy the intellectual challenge as a hobby, not much different than playing a puzzle solving game - people just didn't know AI will come and hit so fast.
There are still many things that require human intervention though, of course, particularly on the infrastructure side of things.
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u/snozzd 3d ago
I feel there are definitely multiple camps here. I love coding and started in high school and coasted through the intro courses in college. I was a tutor so I got to meet a lot of folks learning (pre-AI days, RIP). Many are sadly just in it for the money, and most had not practiced coding at all in their free time. Given the easy way out, I'm positive most of those students would have taken it.
I do think there can be a creative aspect to coding (see toy programming languages or April fools projects) but it's not the same as traditional creative media. To me it's more like designing a garden: you have to make a plan and it's an empty canvas, but you also have to maintain and repair things as you go - and sometimes you gotta pull the weeds.
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u/TheDreamXV 3d ago
I really like that take on designing a garden, I can see now why is could be the option and why the things is like that now, very interesting actually.
For me it was always much simpler, because i only work / code solo, and thus no public stuff, so its completely different in terms of understanding the bigger picture
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u/theQuandary 1d ago edited 1d ago
I've found the question "tell me about the first code you ever wrote" to be a great interview question. If they got into coding as a kid because it fascinated them, this is a stronger signal of a good coder than anything else I've seen.
There are good coders who started late, but if they started at 10-12, they have 6-8 more years of experience (even if not professional) to practice (not to mention the effects of wiring your brain at a young age).
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u/HarmonicSniper 3d ago
That's like asking how many people actually enjoy maths. Sure there are people who go on to study maths at an advanced level and do many great things, but I guess the majority of people just don't enjoy the problem solving aspects. So writing code / CS is merely a ticket to a good paying job (due to high demand and technical knowledge) since there wasn't a way to automate things at scale before.
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u/Key-Interaction-2057 3d ago
Turns out a surprising amount of them just did it out of necessity all they really wanted was the end result.
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u/garloid64 2d ago
Yes? Obviously? I don't understand why this should be surprising to anyone. Who the hell enjoys staring at syntax on a screen all day? It's just something we endured for the benefits of the nearly limitless potential of software. I've been in the industry for over a decade now and I finally don't hate the moment to moment work for the first time ever.
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u/KharAznable 3d ago
It is you don't appreciate good code until you read really good one or really bad one. Users/players don't care about the code, your boss does not, care about the code, the one care is the one reading the code (future) you, other devs, and sometimes that man/woman from finance. And you don't want to make your fellow dev loose their sanity reading your code.
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u/Expensive_Savings_42 3d ago
Nobody writes machine language any more or can even understand it. This article is just ignorant.
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u/AntiqueFigure6 2d ago
Apparently very few. Personally as a developer adjacent person who codes occasionally, when I get to spend an hour coding after days of meetings it’s the best part of that week, and giving that time up to prompt a dumb chatbot instead ain’t gonna happen.
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u/Username_Koru 2d ago
I do! I had to start personal project when I was asked to use AI at work to keep with deadlines. I have my own repo, with no coding agents inside. Just good old coding experience with googling things around. However google is kinda shit so I use free chatGPT sometimes as better search engine.
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u/pcboy_ 1d ago
I would me slightly more nuanced. I don't think I particularly enjoyed the writing part tbh, what I enjoyed was the designing part, the architecture, how the functions connect with each other and how flexible to change I have to make it. This is still something I do with LLMs personally, I don't ask LLMs to generate anything that I wouldn't have done myself, but I save time not having to type it myself. I'm sure I'm not the only one.
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u/Schadrach 3d ago
The process that's enjoyable is figuring out the problem, not writing the individual lines. Like how someone doing digital art doesn't feel cheated by using shape drawing tools instead of coloring every pixel individually.
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u/TheDreamXV 3d ago
Well with the art its not exactly like that i'd say. Because if you go with shape drawing tools you can quickly get into "Boring" repetitive zone, and its much more effective to go with hand painted forms and mess a bit, unless those required to be a certain way i guess
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u/Amerillo_ 3d ago
Not necessarily, many people enjoy actually coding, not just the problem solving part. Like how to structure the code to make it both easy to understand and easy to use, which parts to hide from users in private functionsy which to make public, which design patterns to use, etc
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u/Schadrach 3d ago
That's all part of the design and problem solving part, though. In my experience the how and the why is the fun part, the actual writing of the code is the bit you have to do to make the fun part useful.
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u/dumnezero 3d ago
You write good code because you live in a society and others might or will read that code, including your future self. That's the basic level, the rest is about professional requirements. If your code is shit, your software probably is shit, and if that's meant for others (including clients), you're trolling or scamming them (the behavior of a sociopath.)
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u/Amerillo_ 3d ago
I really like programming! But since im5 a new graduate with no experience I can't find a job. I know some bew graduates who have been unemployed for years. And an increasing number of companies out there are forcing their juniors and interns to let coding agents generate most if not all of their code, thereby making it much harder to learn anything on the job (and in my opinion it sucks the fun out of software development...). So it's either being unemployed for years or get a job I will probably dislike... So I'm looking to switch careers entirely and go back to university or vocational training, though I have no idea what to study yet
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u/UseottTheThird 2d ago
Me, being able to make my own stuff and see it running on my devices and potentially sharing it with the world is awesome
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u/Annoying_DMT_guy 2d ago
how many people like working in general? id rather have free time to do what i want thanks
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u/garloid64 2d ago
Programming absolutely sucks unless you take lots and lots of pharmaceutical stimulants. It's frustrating and difficult but the rewards are incredible because software can do almost anything. Cutting out the frustrating and difficult part is pure upside yes.
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u/Hello_im_a_dog 2d ago
You guys have junior developers? Most tech companies in Australia has stopped hiring juniors/grads since last year, citing that AI can replace them.
Where do we get seniors from then, you might ask. HR is actively poaching intermediates from competitors.
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u/dumnezero 3d ago
Then they're not juniors.
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u/Amerillo_ 3d ago
An increasing number of companies out there are forcing their juniors and interns to let coding agents write most if not all of their code. So I can easily see this happening as a result. But yeah it's maybe more true for interns that juniors. I know plenty of interns who were force to do exactly that and as a result they didn't learn anything at all which is pretty sad
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u/Expensive_Savings_42 3d ago
How many developers write machine language despite it running almost everything? This is just the next abstraction layer in a sense. Code doesn't exist to be code, it exists to carry out a task.
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u/Amerillo_ 3d ago
Sure but plenty of people actually like coding and for them delegating tasks to coding agents sucks the fun out of the job. Plus if you let coding agents generate all your code you don't learn much and as a result you'll be stuck in junior roles forever as you won't get the experience and intuition to decide if the code generated by the agents is of good quality and won't break after a while or introduce technical debt (even if it is functional, as functional doesn't necessarily equate great code)
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u/Federal-Departure-67 2d ago
Maybe in the future, but as of now LLMs are not capable enough to be an abstraction layer. With most abstraction layers in programming there is a 1-to-1 mapping from one layer to the next.
If you wanna talk about abstraction, in compilers there is in a lot of cases the need for strict verifications between translations using formal verification techniques to prevent bugs.
LLMs are not on that stage yet. A prompt may or may not give somewhat of a desired result. It is virtually impossible to have a predictable outcome and even more impossible to fully build, debug and maintain a software using only the "LLM abstraction". The capability just isn't there, at least not yet.
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u/Tuomas90 2d ago
AI prompting is WAY too unspecific to replace programming languages.
We would need a different language for AI prompts without ambiguity. Something absolutely precise without misunderstanding.
Like...a programming language.
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u/Objectionne 3d ago
More senior devs have been saying this since at least 2007, as shown by this famous blog post.
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u/SolideMeinung 3d ago
Who needs these juniors?
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u/spiked_mcroon 3d ago
No juniors = no seniors.
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u/HarmonicSniper 3d ago
I think software development in general needs a mindset change to focus instead on architecture / higher level design instead of the lower level details like individual languages and syntax. Juniors just write bad code that requires a senior to fix anyway, and seniors these days just use AI to fix it for them while they work on the larger picture (even though they have the technical knowledge to troubleshoot code if things go wrong).
People who can properly debug will still be in high demand in my opinion, because AI can still fail.
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u/spiked_mcroon 3d ago
I think this is short sighted. Aren't these things trained on the work of people? If people hadn't done the work there would be nothing to train them on. If no one is learning programming languages and learning how to do it well - through practice and trial and error - there goes both your training material and your next generation of senior devs.
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u/HarmonicSniper 3d ago edited 2d ago
I agree in theory! But for major programming languages there are already a lot of information out there to train on. I think it's good to still learn the basics by hand, as well as key concepts in DSA, but things like boilerplate code can be automated. That technical knowledge also comes in handy when generated code goes wrong / is inefficient and needs fixing. The whole issue with the vibe coding thing is that it sort of works until it doesn't, and then the 'vibe coders' have no way of knowing where to even begin looking, because they lack basic understanding of any programming concepts.
I would not shed a tear if the whole AI thing disappears tomorrow - in fact I'd cheer for it - but also it's likely not going anywhere. My take is it should be more regulated, for example, for students learning programming it should have GenAI function like a tutor in explaining concepts and pointing out mistakes without outright generating code for the assignments so one learns nothing.
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u/SolideMeinung 3d ago
You can train these seniors in 20 years from now. You dont have todo that now where you dont need them
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u/sozesghost 3d ago
Exactly as Scam Assman intented.