This isn’t black and white. There will always be some junior hires. No one is saying replace ALL of them. But hiring 1 junior engineer instead of 3? Maybe…and that’s already happening to some degree.

I was just ballparking the salary. Say it’s only 100x. Does the argument change? It’s a lot more money to pay for a real person.

I've always had problems with junior engineers (self included) going down bad paths, since before there was Google search - let alone AI.

So far ai overall creates more mess faster.

Maybe it is moving faster, maybe they do bother the senior engineers less often than they used to, but for throw-away proof of concept and similar stuff, the juniors+AI are getting better than the juniors without senior support used to be... Is that a good direction? No. When the seniors are over-tasked with "Priority 1" deadlines (nothing new) does this mean the juniors can get a little further on their own and some of them learn from their own mistakes? I think so.

Where I started, it was actually the case that the PhD senior engineers needed help from me fresh out of school - maybe that was a rare circumstance, but the shop was trying to use cutting edge stuff that I knew more about than the seniors. Basically, everything in 1991 was cutting edge and it made the difference between getting something that worked or having nothing if you didn't use it. My mentor was expert in another field, so we were complimentary that way.

My company (now) wants metrics on a lot of things, but they also understand how meaningless those metrics can be.

I have to spend more time helping the junior guys out of the holes dug by ai, making it net negative

https://clip.cafe/monsters-inc-2001/all-right-mr-bile-it/

Shame. There was a time that people dug out of their own messes, I think you learn more, faster that way. Still, I agree - since 2005 I have spend a lot of time taking piles of Matlab, Fortran, Python that have been developed over years to reach critical mass - add anything else to them and they'll go BOOM - and translating those into commercially salable / maintainable / extensible Qt/C++ apps, and I don't think I ever had one "mentee" through that process who was learning how to follow in my footsteps, the organizations were always just interested in having one thing they could sell, not really a team that could build more like it in the future.

it’s just another tool.

Yep.

If you had to answer how much time autocomplete saved you, could you provide any sort of meaningful answer?

Speaking of meaningless metrics, how many people ask you for Lines Of Code counts, even today?___