- Relevant post by Kent Beck from 12th Dec 2025: The Bet On Juniors Just Got Better https://tidyfirst.substack.com/p/the-bet-on-juniors-just-got...
> The juniors working this way compress their ramp dramatically. Tasks that used to take days take hours. Not because the AI does the work, but because the AI collapses the search space. Instead of spending three hours figuring out which API to use, they spend twenty minutes evaluating options the AI surfaced. The time freed this way isn’t invested in another unprofitable feature, though, it’s invested in learning. [...]
> If you’re an engineering manager thinking about hiring: The junior bet has gotten better. Not because juniors have changed, but because the genie, used well, accelerates learning.
by orliesaurus
10 subcomments
- Interesting take... I'm seeing a pattern... People think AI can do it all... BUT I see juniors often are the ones who actually understand AI tools better than seniors... That's what AWS CEO points out... He said juniors are usually the most experienced with AI tools, so cutting them makes no sense... He also mentioned they are usually the least expensive, so there's little cost saving... AND he warned that without a talent pipeline you break the future of your org... As someone who mentors juniors, I've seen them use AI to accelerate their learning... They ask the right questions, iterate quickly, and share what they find with the rest of us... Seniors rely on old workflows and sometimes struggle to adopt new tools... HOWEVER the AI isn't writing your culture or understanding your product context... You still need people who grow into that... So I'm not worried about AI replacing juniors... I'm more worried about companies killing their own future talent pipeline... Let the genies help, but don't throw away your apprentices.
- I - senior - can patch an application in an unknown language and framework with the AI. I know enough to tell it to stop the wildly stupid ideas.
But I don't learn. That's not what I'm trying to do- I'm trying to fix the bug. Hmm.
I'm pretty sure AI is going to lead us to a deskilling crash.
Food for thought.
- > “Number one, my experience is that many of the most junior folks are actually the most experienced with the AI tools. So they're actually most able to get the most out of them.”
Would that experience be from cheating on their homework? Are you sure that's the skill you want to prioritize?
> “Number two, they're usually the least expensive because they're right out of college, and they generally make less. So if you're thinking about cost optimization, they're not the only people you would want to optimize around.”
Hahaha. Sounds like a threat. Additional context for this is that Amazon has a history of stack ranking and per-manager culling quotas, and not as much a reputation for caring about employees like Google did.
> “Three, at some point, that whole thing explodes on itself. If you have no talent pipeline that you're building and no junior people that you're mentoring and bringing up through the company, we often find that that's where we get some of the best ideas.”
I thought the tech industry had given up on training and investing in juniors for long-term, since (the thinking goes) most of them will job-hop in 18 months, no matter how well you nurture. Instead, most companies are hiring for the near-term productivity they can get, very transactionally.
Does AWS have good long-term retention of software engineers?
by frostiness
10 subcomments
- I can't help but feel this is backpedaling after the AI hype led to people entering university avoiding computer science or those already in changing their major. Ultimately we might end up with a shortage of developers again, which would be amusing.
by alexgotoi
30 subcomments
- The thing people miss in these “replace juniors with AI” takes is that juniors were never mainly about cheap hands on keyboards. They’re the only people in the org who are still allowed to ask “dumb” questions without losing face, and those questions are often the only signal you get that your abstractions are nonsense.
What AI does is remove a bunch of the humiliating, boring parts of being junior: hunting for the right API by cargo-culting Stack Overflow, grinding through boilerplate, getting stuck for hours on a missing import. If a half-decent model can collapse that search space for them, you get to spend more of their ramp time on “here’s how our system actually fits together” instead of “here’s how for-loops work in our house style”.
If you take that setup and then decide “cool, now we don’t need juniors at all”, you’re basically saying you want a company with no memory and no farm system – just an ever-shrinking ring of seniors arguing about strategy while no one actually grows into them.
Always love to include a good AI x work thread in my https://hackernewsai.com/ newsletter.
- So he's saying we should be replacing the seniors with fresh grads who are good at using AI tools? Not a surprising take, given Amazon's turnover rate.
by epolanski
3 subcomments
- My experience is that juniors have an easier time to ramp up, but never get better at proper engineering (analysis) and development processes (debug). They also struggle to read and review code.
I fear that unless you heavily invest in them and follow them, they might be condemned to have decades of junior experience.
by bespokedevelopr
3 subcomments
- Some of my friends who are senior/staff engs at various fang companies are basically convinced their jobs are at risk over the next few years due to how good the llms have gotten this year.
I switched over to consulting/contracting so I don’t have the visibility like they do, but my work is heavily dependent on llms. However I don’t see it wiping out the industry but rather making people more efficient.
They have much more robust tooling though around their llms and internal products that have automated much of their workflows which is I believe where the concern is coming from. They can see first hand how much of their job has turned into reviewing outputs and feeding outputs into other tools. A shift in skills but not fully automated solution yet.
It’s hard to gauge where things are going and where we’ll be in 5 years. If we only get incremental improvements there’s still huge gains to be made in building out tooling ecosystems to make this all better.
What does that look like for new college grads though? How much of this is really computer science if you are only an llm consumer?
- I, as an experienced engineer, am not afraid of the power of AI to take my job. I'm afraid of midwits who think it can, that hold the purse strings.
by benjismith
0 subcomment
- I think the biggest injury to the hiring of junior devs happened after COVID made remote-work ubiquitous. It's a lot harder for a junior dev to get real mentorship, including the ambient kind of mentorship-by-osmosis, when everyone works alone in a sad dark room in their basement, rather than in an office with their peers and mentors.
The advent of agentic coding is probably punch #2 in the one-two punch against juniors, but it's an extension of a pattern that's been unfolding for probably 5+ years now.
- Meanwhile:
"Amazon announces $35 billion investment in India by 2030 to advance AI innovation, create jobs" https://www.aboutamazon.com/news/company-news/amazon-35-bill... (Dec 9 2025)
by siliconc0w
0 subcomment
- "AI will replace software developers"
"If your seniors are resisting AI and saying it doesn't work, replace them with AI-native engineers!"
"AI will replace all junior software developers"
"AI will be a tool to help junior software developers"
Eventually we will get to:
"AI requires and will likely to continue to require pretty heavy hand holding and is not a substitute for building and maintaining independent subject matter expertise"
by kachapopopow
0 subcomment
- I think the bigger problem is that if you elimitate jr devs you kind of just extend the amount of time in college required - effectively requiring to roleplay being in a real company doing real jobs until you gain the experience to go straight into a more senior job, but I mean doctors have relitively the same problem where there is no such thing as entry level because when you are responsible for human lives anything other than a senior role is often not enough.
- I recently pair-worked with two junior developers (on their first job, but still with like 2+ years with the company) in order to transfer the know-how of something.
I realized that they are shockingly bad at most basic things. Still their PR:s look really good (on the surface). I assume they use AI to write most of the code.
What they do excel in is a) cultural fit for the company and b) providing long-term context to the AIs for what needs to be done. They are essentially human filters between product/customers and the AI. They QA the AI models' output (to some extent).
- This is written without any acknowledgement of how short-term thinking has poisoned the entire (world of work? Capitalist system? IDK).
Yes, killing your talent pipeline is a horrible idea. But that's Future CEO's problem. When we need new seniors to backfill natural attrition, we can poach them from competitors.
And juniors don't make that much less money, either. Sure, there are people who do light frontend work on Wordpress sites and stuff, who make a lot less. But at my place of work, when we had junior SWEs (we either developed them into seniors in the past 3 years or let them attrition), they were making about ¾ of what seniors make. So, you can pay 4 juniors or you can pay 2-3 seniors. Arguably 1 senior using AI will be a lot more sustainable than 4 juniors burning tokens all day trying to get Cursor to do things they don't really even understand and can't evaluate effectively.
Anyway I completely agree that all of this, especially eliminating the bottom 2 steps of the career ladder for engineers, is horrible for our entire industry. But our incentive structure will richly reward companies for doing this. Stock price go up. Let Future CEO worry about it.
by cowsandmilk
0 subcomment
- He said the same thing four months ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44972151
- The main problem Garman overlooks is skill degradation. AI is excellent at helping a junior quickly draft boilerplate or find the right API, but it doesn't teach the essentials: debugging, systems thinking, and reading complex code. A junior who grows up on AI "crutches" risks never learning to solve the complex, ambiguous problems that distinguish a senior engineer.
- Btw, it's funny that certain kind of people tend to believe in common sense only when it comes from the mouth of the AWS CEO or a similar persona, and one can be ridiculed when saying the same thing as an anynomous commenter.
- 1. replacing junior engineers, with AI ofcourse breaks the talent pipeline. Seniors will retire one day, who is going to replace them? Are we taking the bet, that we wont need any engineer at that time? sounds dangerous.
2. Junior engineer's heavy reliance on AI tools is a problem in itself. AI tools learn from existing code that is written by senior engineers. Too much use of AI by junior engineers will result in deterioration of engineering skills. It will eventually result in AI learning from AI generated code. This is true for most other content as well, as more and more content on internet is AI generated.
- We frequently get juniors or interns who are perfectly capable of pumping out many LoC with the use of AI in various forms - the issue is that they _don't_ actually ever learn how to think for themselves, and can't fix problems when something goes wrong or the LLM paints itself into a corner. I have found myself doing a lot more shepherding and pairing with juniors when they can't figure something out recently, because they just have not had the space to build their own skills.
by twostorytower
9 subcomments
- Well, yeah. Then who will become the senior engineers in 10-15 years?
- Full disclosure: I am pretty sour on the current Amazon/AWS leadership as I think, well, they couldn't lead a company out of a paper bag (former manager at AWS). Is there data that Amazon/AWS is still hiring junior devs? I've heard it's very hard to get into student programs these days but I don't have the data. My grumpy position would be Garmin saying one thing and doing another.
by rippeltippel
1 subcomments
- > In fact, 30% of companies that laid off workers expecting savings ended up increasing expenses, and many had to rehire later.
Such as (cough...) Amazon?
by welliebobs
0 subcomment
- Do we really think that we're going to see all developers morph into one archetype where we all have exactly the same effective skills? Many engineers already have an area of interest where they focus, be that performance optimisation or high level architecture.
It's my prediction that we're going to see more specialised skill sets become more commonplace. We'll have developers who can effectively use AI to bootstrap PoC's, developers who use AI in well established code bases to increase velocity (think asking Cursor to implement another set of REST endpoints for a new type), and developers who might choose to exclude AI from their workflows.
Eventually (I hope, at least) it'll be expected that it's another tool that developers can use in their day to day and less of the Omnissiah that has come to replace us as developers.
- I have heard this thing quite a few times over last few months each time is Amazon or AWS CEOs. May be this time he want to replace senior engineers. That would be more useful for them as each passing year they more and more of them and in times like these they are not looking to go leave Amazon on their own.
- Much like saying you can replace an accountant with a calculator in 1970. Ai coding has its place, but it has a long way to go and if anything junior devs and AI coding agents do raise a whole topic of debate.
Is learning to code with AI coding agents going to make you a better programmer than one who learns to code without such tools?
by stargrazer
0 subcomment
- Will these intro AI systems then mature to be senior devs who can then mentor more junior AIs? Then we won't need any devs? Isn't that the end goal, AI runs the company and we can all go fishing?
- I believe the idea is to not stop hiring juniors. Instead it's to replace anybody that commands a high salary with a team of cheaper juniors armed with LLM's. The idea is more about dragging down average pay than never hiring anybody. At least for now.
by focusgroup0
3 subcomments
- Which is a less dumb idea: replacing new grad junior devs with AI or H1Bs?
by jaredcwhite
0 subcomment
- The level of cynicism here is astronomical. After discovering the strategy of "fire juniors and let a few seniors manage autonomous agents" was an abject failure, now the line is "actually juniors are great because we've brainwashed them into thinking AI is cool and we don't have to pay them so much". Which makes me want to vomit.
The only relevant point here is keeping a talent pipeline going, because well duh. That it even needs to be said like it's some sort of clever revelation is just another indication of the level of stupid our industry is grappling with.
The. Bubble. Cannot. Burst. Soon. Enough!!
by twelvechess
2 subcomments
- Most of the apps that I use regularly fail at least once a day nowadays. I think this is a direct cause of putting AI code in production without reviewing/QA.
by HeavyStorm
0 subcomment
- Thank God someone still has a functioning brain.
You should replace devs vertically, not horizontally, otherwise, who'll be you senior dev tomorrow?
Jokes aside, AI has the potential to reduce workforce across the board, but companies should strive to retain all levels staffed with humans. Also, an LLM can't fully replace even a junior, not yet at least.
- Juniors are also more likely to be the MOST proficient/comfortable with AI tooling.
Pair them with a senior so they can learn engineering best practices:
And now you've also just given your senior engineers some extra experience/insights into how to more effectively leverage AI.
It accelerates the org to have juniors (really: a good mix of all experience levels)
- Ive been managing and supporting teams for a long time and i'm sorry, but junior and mid-level devs do the majority of the heavy lifting when it comes to work output in big corps. I don't think AI will replace them. I don't think all these IC5 and IC6 engineers are going to be putting up 400-500 diffs a year anytime soon.
- I gave opus an "incorrect" research task (using this slash command[1]) in my REST server to research to use SQLite + Litestream VFS can be used to create read-replicas for REST service itself. This is obviously a dangerous use of VFS[2] and a system like sqlite in general(stale reads and isolation wise speaking). Ofc it happily went ahead and used Django's DB router feature to implement `allow_relation` to return true if `obj._state.db` was a `replica` or `default` master db.
Now claude had access to this[2] link and it got the daya in the research prompt using web-searcher. But that's not the point. Any Junior worth their salt — distributed systems 101 — would know _what_ was obvious, failure to pay attention to the _right_ thing. While there are ideas on prompt optimization out there [3][4], the issue is how many tokens can it burn to think about these things and come up with optimal prompt and corrections to it is a very hard problem to solve.
[1] https://github.com/humanlayer/humanlayer/blob/main/.claude/c...
[2] https://litestream.io/guides/vfs/#when-to-use-the-vfs
[3] https://docs.boundaryml.com/guide/baml-advanced/prompt-optim...
[4]https://github.com/gepa-ai/gepa
by KnuthIsGod
0 subcomment
- Team at a bank I know went from 13 members to 2.
The remaining two are likely to be outsourced.
They are trying to transition to the business side.
Folks in Hyderabad can run LLMs too and data centre and infrastructure costs are lower in India.
- Junior vs senior is the wrong framing. It's "can use LLMs effectively" vs "can't use LLMs effectively".
It's like expecting someone to know how to use source control (which at some point wasn't table stakes like it is today).
by shevy-java
0 subcomment
- Yet the big corporations all do it. So, something in the
meta-explain-chain here does not work. You can not go about
"this is a dumb idea", but then do it anyway - that just
doesn't add up.
- A Junior Dev is not just for Christmas, it’s for life.
But more seriously are there CEOs out there who think they can replace the people starting off in their industry with AI? Who do the think will be the senior devs in 5-10yrs?
- But I think the actual reason was not addressed. The work of junior devs is exactly what can be replaced by AI, instead of the more complex abilities senior development possess.
by JanickSpielmann
0 subcomment
- If you don't invest in juniors, it will only be like 20 years until you're out of seniors.
- > A company that relies solely on AI to handle tasks without training new talent could find itself short of people.
I kind of agree with this point from the perspective of civilisation.
- Same story from 4 months ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44972151
by gaptoothclan
0 subcomment
- old zuckerburg said 80% of junior developers would be cut in 2026, I say 80% of CEO's who replace their software engineers will be cut in 2026
- The third point is applicable to general demographic survival as well. Countries with most child birth rates, would ultimately win.
- Obviously. If you don't have junior devs you will never have senior ones either. It's implicit.
by echelon_musk
1 subcomments
- > AWS CEO says using AI to replace junior staff is 'Dumbest thing I've ever heard' (theregister.com) 1697 points by JustExAWS 3 months ago
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44972151
Does this story add anything new?
by stillworks
0 subcomment
- And yet, they won't like it if aspiring SDEs use AI to "assist" when interviewing :D
Just yesterday had a coding interview (not any FAANG) and the interviewer wanted a screen share and also checked my IDE settings to make sure "AI" was turned off.
Not that I intended to or even intend to use LLM based tooling for interviews.
Although having said that, if I intended to, interviewers won't find out. Interviews should always be done in person. (That took a different tangent... sorry)
by reassess_blind
0 subcomment
- Junior devs become senior devs. No more junior devs = no more senior devs.
- Cheaper in the short term until executives turn over, then it's the next guy's problem.
- Is that still true if all the junior engineers are using AI?
- By the way, junior devs are using AI for their work.
- I don't know, I've always thought that junior problem was mostly non-technical, kids issues: overconfidence, love for shortcuts, sense of entitlement, arrogance, lack of communication and respect of colleagues, including fellow juniors and seniors, aversion to holy wars, lack of compromise and team discipline, disrespect to existing solutions, laziness in following-up post-delivery, negligent edge case checking, being opinionated about tooling, languages and whatnot.
Very little of this can be fixed with AI, and many things can be easily amplified.
I mean, one junior with AI vs one senior with AI might yield comparable results, but seven juniors with AI vs seven seniors with AI should fail pretty fast.
- Watch them what they do, not what they say.
- so what is the take away message? fire only the senior devs cause they cost too much and can't use AI?
- some companies doing the opposite, firing senior devs and hiring junior with AI experience
- first the junior then the senior and finally the ceo...
- Now with AI, I expect junior developers to learn much quicker and progress to senior very quickly. I'd now rather hire at least 1 of each to begin with, both "junior" and a "senior" developer and then additionally hire more juniors to quickly turn them into a "senior".
We do not need to hire anymore outside senior developers who need to be trained on the codebase with AI, given that the junior developers catch up so quickly they already replaced the need to hire a senior developer.
Therefore replacing them with AI agents was quite premature if not completely silly. In fact it makes more sense to hire far less senior developers and to instead turn juniors directly into senior developers to save lots of money and time to onboard.
Problem solved.
by 0xdeadbeefbabe
1 subcomments
- 4) Junior devs have an incomparably superior context window.
- on a separate note- If AI eats the SaaS, what will happen to AWS?
- Replacing juniors with AI is a fantastic idea.
Let’s also replace mids while we’re at it.
— A senior developer
- Somebody gets it.
by testemailfordg2
0 subcomment
- Is or Was?
- Move fast with AI, and break things, many, many things really fast
- I find it a little weird that junior devs are considered not good in general.
When I started working, I think I was fairly competent technically, and usually the people I hired were also pretty good straight out of uni.
by AtNightWeCode
0 subcomment
- What a complete moron. This is why every senior dev hates these idiots in mid management. The kids know better? Yeah right. The new kids knows nothing. Recognizing how things work is not knowledge.
- To me the more insidious problem is that we have juniors now that aren’t learning much because they lean on AI for everything. They are behind the curve.
by johnwheeler
0 subcomment
- …proceeds to replace junior devs with AI
- They know AI is inefficient and mostly just a glorified "template filler" at this point...
- he is saying that while doing that. if you look at who gets laid off and who gets hired guess what? l7-l6 are fired. l4-l5 hired. they most likely think replacing senior by a junior with ai is worth it financially
- This is performative bullshit pandering to the increased skepticism around AI. He wouldn't be saying that if AI investment was still in full swing.
I do agree with him about AI being a boon to juniors and pragmatic usage of AI is an improvement in productivity, but that's not news, it's been obvious since the very beginnings of LLMs.
- I would think you need Juniors to get Seniors. Or is there another way?
by butterisgood
0 subcomment
- correct.
- Am I going crazy or he already said that several months ago?
- shareholder wouldn't like this
- FINALLY.
by Madmallard
0 subcomment
- I don't really understand this comment from the CEO.
Does he not understand the people making millions or billions off AI literally do not care?
They fully are committed to seeing if they can do away with having to employ people all together.
They want techno-feudalism.
Sam Altman and the ilk are so anti-humanity seeming in interviews it's really disgusting that we allow them to be in a position of power at all.
- Isn't it weird how nobody here cared about Silicon Valley ageism until it hurt junior developers. No, I don't have schadenfreude. I just see a bunch of people, even in this very thread, now claiming juniors somehow understand AI tools better than seniors. Even though we've all had the same amount of time to use them.
At some point, admit you have a problem maybe? Maybe that will only happen after you spent 20 years staying on top of the latest tools and tech only to be told you're out of style because your hair started to grey.
by mocha_nate
0 subcomment
- and yet...
by coolThingsFirst
0 subcomment
- Yes they decapitated careers now when the bubble is about to burst, well sorry.
- They must’ve forgot who created the first tech hype bubbles in the first place bc I’m about to replace some of these companies if I don’t get hired soon
by dogemaster2032
0 subcomment
- [flagged]
- [flagged]
- This sounds like a comment from someone who doesn't have visibility into how good the models are getting and how close they are to fully autonomous, production-grade software development.
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