Love that you needed to make it clear that it is humans that can explain themselves..

Employees can only be held accountable with severe malice.

There is a good chance that the person actually responsible (eg. The ceo or someone delegated to be responsible) will soon prefer to have AIs do the work as their quality can be quantified.

What theory is that?

My experience is the absolute opposite. I am much more in control of quality with Ai agents.

I am never letting junior to midlevels into my team again.

In fact, I am not sure I will allow any form of manual programming in a year or so.

> I am never letting junior to midlevels into my team again

Exactly. You control the quality of the people in your team. You can train, fire, hire, etc until you get the skill level you want.

You have effectively no control over the quality of the output from an LLM. You get what the frontier labs give you and must work with that.

That is not correct.

It is much easier to control quality of an Ai than of inexperienced developers.

I think we are talking past each other.

> I am never letting junior to midlevels into my team again

My point is, you control the experience level of the engineers on your team. The fact that you can say you won't let junior or midlevels on your team proves that.

You do not have that level of control with LLMs. Anthropic and OpenAI are roughly the same quality at any given time. The rest are not useful.

Ah, so that is not entirely correct.

I can control LLMs through skills and other gateways.

There are still tasks that LLMs does not really carry out that well, where a proper senior is needed.

Butnthese tasks are quickly disappearing, especially while the code base is slowly being optimized for agentic engineering.

Eh. You want a good mix of experience levels, what really matters is everyone should be talented. Less experienced colleagues are unburdened by yesterday’s lessons that may no longer be relevant today, they don’t have the same blind spots.

Also, our profession is doomed if we won’t give less experienced colleagues a chance to shine.

Our profession is likely doomed not because we don't train people, but by the lack of demand

> I am never letting junior to midlevels into my team again

From a different one of your posts

So you're the one dooming the profession. Nice work, thank you!

No, I genuinely don't belive there is the future demand for that many developers.

And the developers we need do not jump through the career progression of Junior to senior.

Why the f** would I keep investing in a profession I think is dead or seriously contracting?

Do you not find that depressing and sad? Do you never work with enthusiastic and talented junior developers at the start of their careers? Do you not enjoy interacting with them?

Well...

I think it would be more depressing taking in exited junior developers, spending years of their life not believing that they are growing into any real career.

> ... the start of their careers

It is exactly this assumption I am challenging.

What comes next, I don't know - and I am not trying to kid myself or any others that I am well suited as a mentor for person starting out their career in the current environment.

Such proposal doesn't need justification. You can merely disagree.

Anyhow. The justification is that it is an important part of a communications infrastructure.

Just like the government finances roads, etc.

I'm not disagreeing with you, but shouldn't free Internet access come before that?

We should be making sure everyone has internet access, but hosting some basic pages is about 1000x cheaper, so no I don't think free internet access should come before that.

Well, he explains all deferred spend.

Deferred spending is quite unnatural. That I can work 1 hour today and buy youghurt in 2 years is an artifact of our system.

But this also relies on someone making that youghurt in 2 years from now.

It is that key dogma that will likely be under pressure for future pensioners.

It is well known that smartphones can be difficult to use with dry skin - like most elderly have

I think this misses the point.

Excessive scrolling is like excessive eating, smoking, or snorting coke.

It is not healthy and not indicative of a full filling life.

Yes, so 80% of 100 hours is considerably less than 80% of 600 hours

You get 80% done in 20% of the time. The LLM shrinks that 20%. So a 100 task maybe takes 5 hours instead of 20 which is great. But the remaining 80 hours are not as improved. So a 100hr job takes ~85 hours which is very good.

This is in-line with Googles study showing about a 10% productivity increase and other research I’ve read. I suspect this will increase with more integrations and workflow adaptations.

But even after power tools changed how quickly carpenters can frame and rough-in a house, the finishing work (which uses power tools too) still takes the majority of the time.

This seems to be an entirely AI promoted post.

dang: Can we get stuff like this out?

It might seem so, but it is not an AI promoted post. The book was finished with the AI tools, but a bulk of it was written by myself plus the structure and direction.

And I am human, who first finished a similar course roughly 20 years ago, worked as a TA and taught students programming and algorithms

I didn't talk about the book.

I talked about the first 5 comments on the thread, all by new accounts.

It seems like an AI campaign. not organic up votes.

OK, I am not sure who these are. I would not promote my post like this. They are indeed new accounts

> The troubling thought I had is that AI does not displace the technicians, or the vending machines. It replaces the manager.

This is really why ai will have a more profound impact on the society: it is fundamentally changing the hierarchy of conpetence we have gotten so accustomed to.

Why the difference that I’ve seen the exact opposite? It brutally reinforces it. It’s no longer the ability to do a task that is valuable, it’s the ability to understand what tasks need to be done.

Yes. So only 2% (down from 90%)of the population is needed in farming now to produce for the rest of 98%.

That is fine because there are other parts of the value chain these 98% people fit into.

With the development of Ai I don't see new areas to graduate into.

So you are right: there will be people left. But it is not clear what the masses can up skill themselves to do.

Nah, pre 4.5 it was not comfortable to use agentic coding.