https://substack.com/@kentbeck

What software projects is he actively working on?

Since desktop computers became popular, there have been thousands of small to mid-size companies that could benefit from software systems.. A thousand thousand "consultants" marched off to their nearest accountant, retailer, small manufacturer or attorney office, to show off the new desktop software and claim ability to make new, custom solutions.

We know now, this did not work out for a lot of small to mid-size business and/or consultants. Few could build a custom database application that is "good enough" .. not for lack of trying.. but pace of platforms, competitive features, stupid attention getting features.. all of that, outpaced small consultants .. the result is giant consolidation of basic Office software, not thousands of small systems custom built for small companies.

What now, in 2025? "junior" devs do what? design and build? no. Cookie-cutter procedures at AWS lock-in services far, far outpace small and interesting designs of software.. Automation of AWS actions is going to be very much in demand.. is that a "junior dev" ? or what?

This is a niche insight and not claiming to be the whole story.. but.. ps- insert your own story with "phones" instead of desktop software for another angle

But for many Jr engineers it’s the hard part. They are not (yet) expected to be responsible for the larger issues.

Because that makes the most business sense.

I would argue a machine that short circuits the process of getting stuck in obtuse documentation is actually harmful long term...

I see none of that happening - software quality is actually in freefall (but AI is not to blame here, this began even before the LLM era), delivery doesn't seem to be any faster (not a surprise - writing code has basically never been the bottleneck and the push to shove AI everywhere probably slows down delivery across the board) nor cheaper (all the money spent on misguided AI initiatives actually costs more).

It is a super easy bet to take with money - software development is still a big industry and if you legitimately believe AI will do 90% of a senior engineer you can start a consultancy, undercut everyone else and pocket the difference. I haven’t heard of any long-term success stories with this approach so far.

I'm yet to see that production-grade code written by these production-grade models;

Week 2: 32 interns

Week 3: 16 interns

Week 4: 8 interns

Week 5: 4 interns

Week 6: 2 interns

Week 7: 1 intern

Week 8: 0.5 interns

Is it possible to make it to the end of the summer without getting sliced in half?

What the hell.

Consider making them fight each other in an arena, you could monetize that.

Even more recently we had this with radiologists, a profession that was supposed to be crushed by deep learning and neural networks. A quick Google search says an average radiologist in the US currently makes between $340,000 to $500,000 per year.

This might be the professional/career version of "buy when there's blood in the streets."

To what?

Considering the talk around junior devs lately on HN, there's way too many of them, it would indeed be amusing.

It's similar to all those people who were hyping up blockchain/crypto/NFTs/web3 as the future, and now that it all came to pass they adapted to the next grift (currently it's AI). He is now toning down his messaging in preparation of a cooldown of the AI hype to appear rational and relevant to whatever comes next.

That's such a terrible trend.

Reminds me of my peers back in ~2001 who opted not to take a computer science degree even though they loved programming because they thought all the software engineering jobs would be outsourced to countries like India and there wouldn't be any career opportunities for them. A very expensive mistake!

Hell, I should probably be studying how to be a carpenter given the level at which companies are pushing vibe coding on their engineers.

For medium or small companies, these guardrails or documentation can be missing. In that case you need experienced people to help out.

Sorry, what does that mean exactly ? Are you claiming that a junior dev knows how to ask the right prompts better than a Senior dev ?

I would have agreed with you 100% one year ago. Basically senior engineers are too complacent to look at AI tools as well as ego driven about it, all while corporate policy disincentivizes them from using anything at all, with maybe a forced Co-Pilot subscription. While junior engineers will take a risk that the corporate monitoring of IP dumping into a cloud AI tool isn't that robust.

But now, although many of those organizations are still the same - with more contrived Co-Pilot subscriptions - I think senior engineers are skirting corporate policy too and become more familiar with tools.

I'm also currently in an organization that is a total free for all with as many AI coding and usage tools as necessary to deliver faster. So I could be out of touch already.

Perhaps more complacent firms are the same as they were a year ago.

Coding in any sufficiently large organization is never the main part of senior's time spend, unless its some code sweatshop. Juniors can do little to no of all that remaining glue that makes projects go from a quick brainstorming meeting to live well functioning and supported product.

So as for worth - companies can, in non-idedal fashion obviously, work without juniors. I can't imagine them working without seniors, unless its some sort of quick churn of CRUDs or eshops from some templates.

Also there is this little topic that resonates recently across various research - knowledge gained fast via llms is a shallow one, doesn't last that long and doesn't go deeper. One example out of many - any time I had to do some more sophisticated regex-based processing I dived deep into specs, implementation etc. and few times pushed it to the limits (or realized task is beyond what regex can do), instead of just given the result, copypasted it and moved along since some basic test succeeded. Spread this approach across many other complex topics. That's also a view on long term future of companies.

I get what you say and I agree partially but its a double edged sword.

In my view there's two parts to learning, creation and taste, and both need to be balanced to make progress. Creation is, in essence, the process of forming pathways that enable you to do things, developing taste is the process of pruning and refining pathways to doing things better.

You can't become a chef without cooking, and you can't become a great one without cultivating a taste (pun intended) for what works and what it means for something to be good.

From interactions with our interns and new-grads, they lack the taste, and rely too much on the AI for generation. The consequence is that when you have conversations with them, they straggle to understand the concepts and tools they are using because they lack the familiarity that comes with creation, and they lack the skills to refine the produced code into something good.

You can describe pre-ai developers and like that too. It's probably my biggest complaint about some of my Co workers

The thing with juniors is: those who are interested in how stuff works now have tools to help them learn in ways we never did.

And then it's the same as before: some hires will care and improve, others won't. I'm sure that many juniors will be happy to just churn out slop, but the stars will be motivated on their own to build deeper understanding.