An engineering blog-post with a title like “ the death of the junior developer”? Written by Steve Yegge? Gotta read it, right?
Sourcegraph has their own chat assistant, Cody, but the point is more general, about how any copilot-like tool is used, and the impact it can have.
I have had similar thoughts, and feel we’re in the midst of this unknown path.
As I always do, reading and sharing quotes here …
On how powerful programming LLMs are similar to very junior programmers:
For all practical purposes, all source code will be written this way, with exceptions becoming ever rarer.
Not only do I believe it, I could even see it happening in 12–18 months at the current rate of LLM progress. I think the change will have a ton of fallout, only some of it foreseeable. And one casualty might well be junior devs, in the sense that they become less marketable and it could cause various kinds of crunches across the industry.
The problem, you see, is that there could be a future where they don’t need junior associates anymore.
Increasingly, they need only senior associates, who (a) describe the tasks to be done; i.e., create the prompts, and (b) review the resulting work for accuracy and correctness. The high-end LLMs do so well with tasks normally fielded by junior associate lawyers, that there isn’t much room left for the real junior associates on payroll.
Catching the LLM in a hallucination, catching a junior associate in a mistake — pretty similar. Really just two options for generating the same output. Except one of those options is fast and tireless and essentially free
On how a human is still needed, someone who can “check the work”:
My senior colleagues have recently recounted similar chat scenarios in which a more junior dev would have been completely taken in, potentially losing days to weeks of work going the wrong direction.
Or worse.
Chat, it seems, is safer for senior programmers than it is for junior ones. And a lot of companies are going to interpret “safer” to mean “better.”
On the dilemma of how to learn:
That presents a very serious problem for new people in those fields. What do you do? How do you learn the ropes, not to mention find gainful employment? What are the ropes now? And what do the companies do when their senior people retire?
There will be social and cultural upheaval in tech, just as is happening in the legal profession. It’s already begun. The models are getting smarter and smarter with each passing month, which means they are going to be eating more and more jobs until they eat the world.
It ends with good advice:
Understand how things are built. Make sure you know how every system in a computer works.
Make sure you have an understanding of how every cloud service you depend on does its job.
Read the docs, and then read the design docs.
You won’t have to write any of it by hand. But you need to develop a senior programmer’s sensibilities around how these things fit together and interact, for good or ill.
P.S. the title is a reference to “ Stevey’s drunken blog rants “
Published
Originally published at http://abacusnoir.com on July 9, 2024.
