The argument is that, instead of hiring a junior engineer, a senior engineer can simply produce enough output to match what the junior would have produced and then some.

Of course, that means you won't be able to train them up, at least for now. That being said, even if they "only" reach the level of your average software developer, they're already going to have pretty catastrophic effects on the industry.

As for automated fixes, there are agents that _can_ do that, like Devin (https://devin.ai/), but it's still early days and bug-prone. Check back in a year or so.

Not training new workers and relying on senior engineers with tools is short sighted and foolish.

LLMs seem to be accelerating the trend

On one hand, I somewhat agree; on the other hand, I think LLMs and similar tooling will allow juniors to punch far beyond their weight and learn and do things that they would have never have dreamed of before. As mentioned in another comment, they're the teacher that never gets tired and can answer any question (with the necessary qualifications about correctness, learning the answer but not the reasoning, etc)

It remains to be seen if juniors can obtain the necessary institutional / "real work" experience from that, but given the number of self-taught programmers I know, I wouldn't rule it out.

I think many people using llms are faking it and have no interest in “making it”.

It’s not about learning for most.

Just because a small subset of intelligent and motivated people use tools to become better programmers, there is a larger number of people that will use the tools to “cheat”.

Tools are foolish? Like, should we remove all of the other tools that make senior engineers more productive, in favor of hiring more people to do those same tasks? That seems questionable.

Tools are great, but there is a way to learn the fundamentals and progress through skills and technology.

Learn to do something manually and then learn the technology.

Do you want engineers who are useless if their calculator breaks or do you want someone who can fall back on pen and paper and get the work done?

Well what if their pen breaks? Perhaps a good fluid dynamics engineer needs to be able to create ink from common plants?

I get the argument, it’s just silly. Calculators don’t “break”. I would rather have an engineer who uses highly reliable tools than one who is so obsessed with the lowest levels of the stack that they aren’t as strong at the top.

I’m willing to live with a useless day in the insanely unlikely event that all readily available calculators stop working.

There's an incentive problem because the benefit from training new workers is distributed across all companies whereas the cost of training them is allocated to the single company that does so

Most broken systems have bad incentives.

Companies don’t want to train people ($) because employees with skills and experience are more valuable to other companies because retention is also expensive.

We are not training AND retaining talent.

> The argument is that, instead of hiring a junior engineer, a senior engineer can simply produce enough output to match what the junior would have produced and then some.

...and that's just as asinine of a claim as the original one

Why? I can say that, in my personal experience, AI has allowed me to work more efficiently as a senior engineer: I can describe the behaviour I want, scan over the generated code and make any necessary fixes much faster than either writing the code myself or having a junior do it.