There’s a terrific writeup from the folks at FlintAI — their team is now 5 devs and 45 agents, all living in Slack. Nine agents per developer. The agents take roles — triage, deploy, review — the human steps in for the two decisions that actually matter (code review, release approval), and they report something like a 3x productivity bump. It’s a genuinely impressive piece of engineering and you should read it.
That’s the model everybody’s racing toward right now: take your best seniors, strap nine agents to them, and harvest the multiple. And it works! I’m not knocking it (and I’m doing it too)!
I’m a senior but if the future of my work is reviewing AI code all day I will buy a bunch of goats and become a goatherder.
Extracting productivity from senior engineers is also burning them out faster.
I’ve already started rebelling. That won “efficiency” is in part mine, I’m just going home. Why would I allow my bosses to reap all of the rewards for my shittier workday? And if they don’t agree, I’m going back to writing by hand.
So basically the AI company with AI in the name uses AI a bunch and evangelizes it.
I heard your goats’ grazing land has a datacenter now.
I tried reading the article, got about halfway through and it just keeps repeating the same thing over and over again. It starts with this:
There’s a shortage coming that nobody’s put on a slide yet: senior engineers. Every company on earth is about to want one who can drive a fleet of agents with judgment — and almost nobody is making new ones anymore, because AI ate the entry-level work juniors used to learn on
That’s it. That’s the whole article as far as I was willing to read. There’s almost no extra information further down. Holy hell.
When you use a LLM to expand two sentence to 5 paragraphs
Yeah, that was probably the prompt. More or less. Then it’s padded with a mountain of slop.
Typical modern article. And then some people are going angry “You obviously have read only the title, not the article in full”. Wonder why people limit themselves only to titles? Maybe because the article is 2 sentences worth of data fit into 20 paragraphs of the life story of Jane Smith who was amazed and sat in awe after reading e-mail that will change her life?
I tend to just look at the comments first here for anything even slightly questionable. Seems like some of the dumbed down shit does actual brain damage to read.
Typical modern book as well. I keep reading classic philosophy just for being amazed at the amount of concepts crammed in under 100 pages.
Never read modern philosophy, but I had completely opposite experience with mid-late XIX century philosophy: too much words and too much repeating of the same thought from too many different angles. But I’m a technician type of guy so I might just have been unlucky with the set of authors. Never cared to read much of philosophy.
No, absolutely. At the very least from Hegel onwards, the game changes.
I read Stoics, the few things we have from Epicureans, Plato, Aristotle and Cicero’s work on rhetoric.
Bert Hubert wrote about the same consideration in a blog post.
I think the consideration itself is valid. But Berts position has a big difference: He does not pretend that he can tell the future. It is quite logical and to expect that people ceasing to work as junior developers, or them not finding a job, might lead to a scarcity of senior developers. But we do not really know what happens. I’d describe it more as the whole field in crisis. And the jobs that remain, might not be the jobs that experienced senior developers, of which e.g. in Germany purely by demographics many are close to retirement, really want to do.
Something similar, at a perhaps smaller scale, has happened during and after the Corona pandemic in Europe in the field of hospitality: People in this sector could not get work, or only short hours. So they left the field, since there were other, better paying jobs, with more friendly work times. Hotels and restaurants experienced a worker shortage. One could have expected that then, the businesses had to pay more to attract people. But this did not happen at a significant scale. Was happened was automation and reduction of work, lowering of service standards, and restaurants closing. Was this predictable? I do not know.
This post is the piece those two were circling around: what happens to the bottom of the chart, and whose job it is to fix it. Spoiler — it’s yours, senior engineer. It’s mine. And most of us are about to get it wrong in a very specific, very tempting way.
BS. Most good seniors I know would love to hire more juniors, feel badly for the mass of recent college grads who are unemployed, and enjoy mentoring new engineers without needing a wall of AI slop to tell them to do so. When you give us control over the hiring budget and let us hire juniors again, you can blame us for the future senior engineer shortage. Until then, blame the people actually at fault (management, executives, the investor class), not us.
Unemployed principal software engineer here. This graph is a lie.
In the US? There are jobs in Europe.
They are well hidden if so
The graph is anticipating the future. Not current. Take a couple years off.
My family had just bought a house before I was laid off, and we’re burning through our savings at an alarming rate. If I don’t find a job soon, I’m going to have to liquidate my retirement account. I don’t have years, I have months.
But if you take a couple of years off, won’t it be tough to get back in?
No one knows.
I think a true Sr shortage is likely decade+ away. So if you need money you gotta make ends meet somehow.
I’m leaning into the AI space, becoming proficient at understanding and developing harnesses for different purposes, running local models, adjusting to context switching more often than not, etc.
I’m currently working a short term AI Cyber gig for a financial firm I already had a relationship with, but then taking time off to tinker.
Dev/Sys/Net Operations, Cyber. All great fields for leaning into AI
If few are entering as entry-level because snubbed by LLMs, there will be fewer seniors — eventually.
Yeah that’s what I said. It takes about a decade to become Sr. So that’s when we will start feeling the shortage.
If you can afford taking a few years off in the first place, you can also afford starting a company and doing your own projects for a while. Don’t leave the field behind, put some software on app stores and pick your topics by what skills you want to learn or maintain. Maybe it even makes money.
Companies are not only no longer taking on juniors, they’re making hardware prohibitively expensive. Where do they expect to get their talent if they force everyone to use their braindead toys?
Everyone thinks LLMs boost productivity. But from psychological point of view, the developer being both the subject and the object is no where near scientific and reliable.
In other words, the developer who is using the LLM also reports they are productive. But humans can rarely be good judge over themselves. That’s why we’ve got therapists. So we have to wait for some serious and well done research if LLMs boost productivity.
Another concern I have which prevents me from using LLMs, is the unknown long term effect on the codebase. You know, writing something is much easier than maintaining it for years after years. And every decision you make, you must be mindful of this. So I’m gonna wait and see what’ll happen after 1-3 years to the softwares with heavy LLM assists. Will their codebase still be easy to maintain?
Stop hiring and mentoring junior engineers and you’ve quietly unplugged the machine that makes senior ones. A few years out, you run dry — right when everyone else is dry too, and the price of the few left goes through the roof.
Written by AI
Didn’t read the article but I love the braindead chart:
The article isn’t much better.
lol this is one way to make sure it doesn’t look like AI wrote your shit.
LLMs are a product that destroys its supply chain — unnamed Microsoft exec
So soon? I figured it’d take a couple years for them to realize how they shot themselves in the foot by not hiring juniors anymore.
It’s fucked and it has been for a while now. You see, you currently put yourself at a disadvantage if you DO hire juniors because later down the line others will just poach them from you. You’ll be lucky if they ever turn into a net positive for your country.
Only way this changes is if most big companies that can take the budget hit start hiring juniors again. Fat chance of that right now.
