My personal experience is quite the opposite. A junior developer with AI is dangerous, and will produce a large amount of work that isn't well architected and will require substantial review and correction. It is easier for me to leverage coding agents to get shit done than it is to even explain what is needed in terms that a junior can run with.
I don’t think the article is suggesting this at all. My takeaway from it (and my own view) is that we need to continue hiring, developing, and growing talent as we have in the past.
Today’s AI tools can generate working code, but it is often difficult to maintain -- especially as a codebase becomes large and complex.
Junior engineers working within a team, alongside senior engineers, with proper guidance and mentorship -- and while learning how to effectively use the current generation of AI tools -- are exactly what the industry needs to avoid a talent shortage in the not-too-distant future.
It's always been easier for more senior/experienced engineers to do things themselves instead of guiding juniors. Your comment doesn't really detail how this is different with AI in the picture.
Call me conservative, but between writing an article against TDD where the main argument was "I don't like the people who do TDD", his opinion on typescript, and the article he wrote on London not being great because it has only 30% whites, I find DHH not really worth listening to. I know, I know, ad hominem, but there's only so much I can read in my life and I have to filter it down somehow. I find that filtering out people who've written a lot of stupid stuff in the past works well for me.
DHH’s argument was about rapid demographic change and loss of a majority culture, grounded (rightly or wrongly) in concerns about social cohesion. An argument you can disagree with, but not reduce to racial preference without distortion.
My personal experience is quite the opposite. A junior developer with AI is dangerous, and will produce a large amount of work that isn't well architected and will require substantial review and correction. It is easier for me to leverage coding agents to get shit done than it is to even explain what is needed in terms that a junior can run with.
I don’t think the article is suggesting this at all. My takeaway from it (and my own view) is that we need to continue hiring, developing, and growing talent as we have in the past.
Today’s AI tools can generate working code, but it is often difficult to maintain -- especially as a codebase becomes large and complex.
Junior engineers working within a team, alongside senior engineers, with proper guidance and mentorship -- and while learning how to effectively use the current generation of AI tools -- are exactly what the industry needs to avoid a talent shortage in the not-too-distant future.
It's always been easier for more senior/experienced engineers to do things themselves instead of guiding juniors. Your comment doesn't really detail how this is different with AI in the picture.
You don’t scale even with agents you just don’t.
Something something, threading isn't parallelism
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Call me conservative, but between writing an article against TDD where the main argument was "I don't like the people who do TDD", his opinion on typescript, and the article he wrote on London not being great because it has only 30% whites, I find DHH not really worth listening to. I know, I know, ad hominem, but there's only so much I can read in my life and I have to filter it down somehow. I find that filtering out people who've written a lot of stupid stuff in the past works well for me.
DHH’s argument was about rapid demographic change and loss of a majority culture, grounded (rightly or wrongly) in concerns about social cohesion. An argument you can disagree with, but not reduce to racial preference without distortion.