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AI slows down some experienced software developers, study finds (www.reuters.com)
submitted 1 year ago by to c/technology@lemmy.world
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[–] -4 points 1 year ago (10 children)

Yeah but a Claude/Cursor/whatever subscription costs $20/month and a junior engineer costs real money. Are the tools 400 times less useful than a junior engineer? I’m not so sure…

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  • [–] 4 points 1 year ago (3 children)

    This line of thought is short sighted. Your senior engineers will eventually retire or leave the company. If everyone replaces junior engineers with ai, then there will be nobody with the experience to fill those empty seats. Then you end up with no junior engineers and no senior engineers, so who is wrangling the ai?

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  • [–] 3 points 1 year ago (2 children)

    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.

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  • [–] 4 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    And when the current senior programmers retire the field of juniors that are coming to replace them will be much smaller.

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  • [–] 3 points 1 year ago

    Not that I agree, but if you believe that the LLMs will continuously improve, then in 5-10 years you may only need 1/3rd the seniors, to oversee and prompt. Again, that's what these CEOs are relying on.

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  • [–] 5 points 1 year ago (4 children)

    Even at $100/month you’re comparing to a > $10k/month junior. 1% of the cost for certainly > 1% functionality of a junior.

    You can see why companies are tripping over themselves to push this new modality.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago (3 children)

    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.

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