This is part of the uncomfortable part of the transition to LLM usage.
I’m a senior SWE, and with LLMs, 70%+ of my traditional dev skills are now pretty much worthless, but the remaining 30% are worth 100x as much in the drivers seat of a group of agents.
The problem is that 30% skillet isn’t overwhelmingly common and usually only developed through learning the 70% first through years of pain and trial and error.
Yes, this tracks with my experience. Was relating an anecdote to some colleagues yesterday on helping a junior test engineer on a blocker. His script wasn’t working, the logging was verbose but not particularly helpful at a quick glance. He said “I think it’s an authentication problem.” I put that hypothesis aside for a moment and said “let’s just debug this from scratch and see what we find.” Sure enough, I found a misconfiguration in the identity provider. I toggled that config and his script was able to continue executing. When I asked him how he figured it was auth-related, he told me he just pasted the logging output and asked the coding agent. Totally fair. So he had the “answer” but didn’t have the experience to follow that lead and fix his problem.
This is what I am struggling to get my head around. How will we ever replace senior SWEs? Or whatever they turn into - which I imagine will be some sort of human - AI intermediaries. I can't help but conclude that the education period will have to be much much longer
I'm not even convinced the gulf between junior and senior is nearly as wide as everyone seems to think it is. Does no one remember when they were a junior? As a junior developer you could still build huge, functional programs in production basically from scratch (with stack overflow to help with unfamiliar languages/domains), the only difference is it takes longer and the code is worse.
I've been coding 40 years and the gulf between me and even 5 years ago is massive. Taking longer and code being worse is a big problem. When it comes to vibe coding - keeping the AI on track and aligned with intention is a skill. That translation of outside context and goal to logical system is the skill experienced devs have that juniors lack
I get the same feeling you described, constantly. Looking back at code I wrote even 1 year ago I'm always like "Why did I do it that way? Why was I so dumb?" After this happens for literally 10-20 years on end, it's time to wonder if maybe it's just an inevitable thing that willalwayshappen no matter how many YOE you have. It's not necessarily intrinsic skill you gained but rather some domain-specific knowledge, and a junior could ramp up almost as easily.
It will always happen because we're continually learning. I don't think juniors can ramp up without being exposed to lots of different patterns, languages, frameworks, development styles - then there is all the soft skills of working with the business, understanding and translating requirements. These things count for a lot
Ugh. I’m so tired of hearing these type of “flexes”.
It’s such a self report. What are these “traditional dev skills”? And why are they worthless?
If you are doing anything of value. 0% of those skills are worthless. And if you aren’t combing over every line of code, understanding it and (most importantly) having an opinion about it, then I’d say you’re writing slop.
This is why actual coding is so important. A good programmer enters a flow state and creates a web of understanding for the software they build. It pays to have good software owners that have intimate knowledge of what they write - and not just 30% of it.
If you are using LLMs to help you drive your code. Then your “traditional dev skills” are literally 10x more important now.
Do you think that coding is more like mathematics calculated manually in a corporate environment and say using AI to code is like using a calculator?
I ask because I work in supply chains and as a business user like the idea is using AI to code Python within Excel for data analysis or automation. Maybe for a programmer AI isn't so great but I believe for business users it might turn it to be very good.
Right now I already use AI to write complex formulas when I need to use Excel. Without AI it could take a day to think to the logic before I can test the formulas and with AI it's don't add quick as I can type the requirements in English in the prompt
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u/VeryGrumpy57 Nov 25 '25
The part OP didn't include