Thanks, Sherlock. Now, tell me, when senior engineers start to retire, who will replace them? Ah, yeah, I can hear you say "LLMs!". And LLMs will rewrite themselves so we won't need seniors anymore writing code. And LLMs will write all the code companies need. So obvious, of course. We won't need a single senior because we won't have them, because they are not hired these days anymore. Perfect plan.
Also right now, the way things are output is still constrained by an actual human engineer, junior or senior. If AI makes juniors 1.5x as effective, the company that is still investing in juniors is going to beat the competitor who decided to save costs and stop investing.
Let's say AI writes perfect, bug free code. Then what?
Suppose we grant the most optimistic scenario: AI generates flawless, production-ready code. No bugs, no regressions, no tech debt. Code is no longer written, it’s summoned.
Cool. But.. now what?
Who writes the requirements? Product managers typing prompts into a text box? CEOs dragging Figma elements and calling it shipped?
How does that scale? Who maintains the systems those prompts create? Other LLMs? And who maintains them? More AI?
It turtles all the way down, a recursive stack of AI maintaining AI, until we’re effectively simulating full stack human engineers in digital form.
At some point, aren't we just reinventing ourselves.. in Python?
TBH the people I see parroting the LLM=junior engineer BS are almost always technically incompetent or so disconnected at this point from what's happening on the ground that they wouldn't know either way.
I've been using the codex agent since before this announcement btw along with most of the latest LLMs. I literally work in the AI/ML tooling space. We're entering a dangerous world now where there's super useful technology but people are trying to use it to replace others instead of enhance them. And that's causing the wrong tools to be built.
