A Research Preview of Codex

This is exactly the problem. The top level executives are setting up to retire with billions in the bank, while the workers develop their own replacements before they retire with millions in the bank. Senior developers will be mostly obsolete too.

I have mentored junior developers and found it to be a rewarding part of the job. My colleagues mostly ignore juniors, provide no real guidance, couldn't care less. I see this attitude from others in the comments here, relieved they don't have to face that human interaction anymore. There are too many antisocial weirdos in this industry.

Without a strong moral and cultural foundation the AGI paradigm will be a dystopia. Humans obsolete across all industries.

Same, mine is about to graduate with a CS masters from a great school. Couldn't get any internships, and is now incredibly negative about ever being able to find work, which doesn't help. We're pretty much looking at minimum wage jobs doing tech support for NGOs at this point (and the current wave of funding cuts from Federal government for those kind of orgs is certainly not going to help with that).

Hiring of juniors is basically dead these days and it has been like this for about 10 years and I hate it. I remember when I was a junior in 2014 there were actually startups who would hire cohorts of juniors (like 10 at a time, fresh out of CS degree sort of folks with almost no applied coding experience) and then train them up to senior for a few years, and then a small number will stay and the rest will go elsewhere and the company will hire their next batch of juniors. Now no one does this, everyone wants a senior no matter how simple the task. This has caused everyone in the industry to stuff their resume, so you end up in a situation where companies are looking for 10 years of experience in ecosystems that are only 5 years old.

That said, back in the early 00s there was much more of a culture of everyone is expected to be self-taught and doing real web dev probably before they even get to college, so by the time they graduate they are in reality quite senior. This was true for me and a lot of my friends, but I feel like these days there are many CS grads who haven't done a lot of applied stuff. But at the same time, to be fair, this was a way easier task in the early 00s because if you knew JS/HTML/CSS/SQL, C++ and maybe some .NET language that was pretty much it you could do everything (there were virtually no frameworks), now there are thousands of frameworks and languages and ecosystems and you could spend 5+ years learning any one of them. It is no longer possible for one person to learn all of tech, people are much more specialized these days.

But I agree that eventually someone is going to have to start hiring juniors again or there will be no seniors.

I think the bigger problem, that started around 2022 is much lower volume of jobs in software development. Projects were shutdown, funding was retracted, even the big wave of migrations to the cloud died down.

Today startups mostly wrap LLMs as this is what VCs expect. Larger companies have smaller IT budgets than before (adjusted for inflation). This is the real problem that causes the jobs shortage.

This is a bit of a game theory problem. "Training senior engineers" is an expensive and thankless task: you bear essentially all the cost, and most of the total benefit accrues to others as a positive externality. Griping at companies that they should undertake to provide this positive externality isn't really a constructive solution.

I think some people are betting on the fact that AI can replace junior devs in 2-5 years and seniors in 10-20, when the old ones are largely gone. But that's sort of beside the point as far as most corporate decision-making.

To be clear, we still hire engineers who are early in their careers (and we've found them to be some of the best folks on our team).

All the same principles apply as before: smart, driven, high ownership engineers make a huge difference to a company's success, and I find that the trend is even stronger now than before because of all the tools that these early career engineers have access to. Many of the folks we've hired have been able to spin up on our codebase much faster than in the past.

We're mainly helping them develop taste for what good code / good practices look like.

I guess the industry leaders think we'll not need senior engineers either as capabilities evolve.

But also, I think this underestimates significantly what junior engineers do. Junior engineers are people who have spent 4 to 6 years receiving a specialised education in a university - and they normally need to be already good at school math. All they lack is experience applying this education on a job - but they are professionals - educated, proactive and mostly smart.

The market is tough indeed, and as much it is tough for a senior engineer like myself, I don't envy the current cohort of fresh grads. It being tough is only tangentially related to the AI though. Main factor is the general economic slowdown, with AI contributing by distracting already scarce investment from non-AI companies and producing a lot of uncertainty in how many and what employees companies will need in the future. Their current capabilities are nowhere near to having a real economic impact.

Wish your kid and you a lot of patience, grit and luck.

> If you aren't hiring junior engineers to do these kinds of things, where do you think the senior engineers you need in the future will come from?

Unfortunately this is not how companies think. I read somewhere more than 20 years ago about outsourcing and manufacturing offshoring. The author basically asked the same: if we move out the so-called low-end jobs, where do we think we will get the senior engineers? Yet companies continued offshoring, and the western lost talent and know-how, while watching our competitor you-know-who become the world leader in increasingly more industries.

As much as I support community developed software and "free as in freedom", "Open Source" got completely perverted into tricking people to work for free for huge financial benefits for others. Your comment is just one example of that.

For that reason all my silly little side projects are now in private repos. I dont care the chance somebody builds a business around them is slim to none. Dont think putting a license will protect you either. You'd have to know somebody is violating your license before you can even think about doing anything and that's basically impossible if it gets ripped into a private codebase and isnt obvious externally.

> doing the basic job of knowledge workers

If you extrapolate and generalize further... what is at risk is any task that involves taking information input (text, audio, images, video, etc.), and applying it to create some information output or perform some action which is useful.

That's basically the definition of work. It's not just knowledge work, it's literally any work.

> P.S., I think the current trend is a wakeup call to us software engineers. We thought we were doing highly creative work, but in reality we spend a lot of time doing the basic job of knowledge workers: retrieving knowledge and interpolating some basic and highly predictable variations. Unfortunately, the current AI is really good at replacing this type of work.

Most of the waking hours of most creative work have this type of drudgery. Professional painters and designers spend most of their time replicating ideas that are well fleshed-out. Musicians spend most of their time rehearsing existing compositions.

There is a point to be made that these repetitive tasks are a prerequisite to come up with creative ideas.

In my experience, it still does take quite a bit of time (minutes) to run a task on these agentic LLMs (especially with the latest reasoning models), and in Cursor / Cline / other code editor versions of AI, it's enough time for you to get distracted, lose context, and start working on another task.

So the benefit is really that during this "down" time, you can do multiple useful things in parallel. Previously, our engineers were waiting on the Cursor agent to finish, but the parallelization means you're explicitly turning your brain off of one task and moving on to a different task.

A single response can take a few seconds, but tasks with agentic flows can be dozens of back and forths. I've had a fairly complicated Roo Code task take 10 minutes (multiple subtasks).

> Each task is processed independently in a separate, isolated environment preloaded with your codebase. Codex can read and edit files, as well as run commands including test harnesses, linters, and type checkers. Task completion typically takes between 1 and 30 minutes, depending on complexity, and you can monitor Codex’s progress in real time.

They wrote "You still need to do a lot of work to get it production ready". So I would say it's not much better than real colleagues. Especially since junior devs will improve to a point they don't need your hand holding (remember you also were a junior at some point), which is not proven will happen with AI tools.

You don't need to be nice to your virtual junior devs. Saves quite a lot time too.

As long as I spend less time reviewing and guiding than doing it myself it's a win for me. I don't have any fun doing these things and I'd rather yelling at a bunch of "agents". For those who enjoy doing bunch of small edits I guess it's the opposite.

Post realizing CC can operate same code base, same file tree on different terminals instances, it's been a significant unlock for us. Most devs have 3 running concurrently. 1. master task list + checks for completion on tasks. 2. operating on current task + documentation. 3. side quests, bugs, additional context.

rinse and repeat once task done, update #1 and cycle again. Add in another CC window if need more tasks concurrently.

downside is cost but if not an issue, it's great for getting stuff done across distributed teams..

Is Zed managing the containerized dev environments, or creating multiple worktrees or anything like that? Or are they all sharing the same work tree?

You need someone thats technical to look at the agent output, senior engineers will be around. Junior engineers are certainly being replaced

automated visual fuzzy-testing with some self-reinforcement loops

There's already library's for QA testing and VLM's can give critique on a series of screenshots automated by a playwright script per branch

Thx for the reply, Im in london too ( atm )

That’s nice. And we trust that it does what it says because…? The AI company (openai, anthropic, etc) pinky promised? Have we seen their source code? How do you know they don’t train?

Facebook has been caught in recent DOJ hearings breaking the law with how they run their business, just as one example. They claimed under oath, previously, to not be doing X, and then years later there was proof they did exactly that.

https://youtu.be/7ZzxxLqWKOE?si=_FD2gikJkSH1V96r

A companies “word” means nothing imo. None of this makes sense if i’m being honest. Unless you personally have a negotiated contract with the provider, and can somehow be certain they are doing what they claim, and can later sue for damages, all of this is just crossing your fingers and hoping for the best.

Not just legal/within the standards, but which actually meet the unspoken requirements of the request. "We just need a new checkbox that asks if you're left handed" might seem easy, but then it has ramifications for the Application PDF that gets generated, as well as any systems downstream, and maybe it requires a data conversion of some sort somewhere. I know that the PO's I work with miss stuff or assume that the request will just have features by default.