I'm not all gloom and doom but the treatment of junior engineers is something I think we will either regret or rejoice. Either will have a spur of creative people doing their own independent thing or we'll have lost a generation of great engineers.

Company brain drain, knowledge leaves with your seniors if you decide to get rid of them, or they just leave due to the conditions AI creates.

I don't know if the above comes to fruition, there's a lot of questions that only time will answer. But those are my first thoughts.

If you fire all your SWEs they won't sit around twiddling their thumbs waiting for an AI collapse, they'll career shift. Maybe to an unemployment line and/or homelessness, maybe to something else productive, but either way they'll lose SWE skills.

If you close down all the SWE junior positions you'll strongly discourage young people training in the field. They'll do something else.

Then if you want to go back, who will you hire for it?

Open-source models have caught up tremendously recently. Those who can’t or don’t want to invest a lot of money can already develop with Kimi and GLM without any problems. We don’t have to wait another year for that.

[1] https://github.com/gsd-build/gsd-2

On the other hand, like giving a supercar to a teenager, this just enables them to get into trouble faster.

(the "my vibe coded app deleted prod!" stories are funny schadenfreude when they happen to SV startups, whose whole business is pretending to know better. When this happens to a small business who've suddenly lost all their finanacials and now maybe will lose their house, it's a tragedy. And this can happen on a much larger, not AI-related scale, like Jaguar Land Rover: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cy9pdld4y81o )