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Revenge of the Junior Developer

The latest instalment from Steve Yegge on viiiiibe coding and what that means for developer jobs.

If you still think of AI-based code-autocompletion suggestions as the primary way programmers use AI, and/or you are still measuring Completion Acceptance Rate (CAR), then you are sitting on the vaguely dinosaur-shaped curve representing Traditional Programming in Figure 1. For calculation purposes, as a rule of thumb, you can think of each coding agent instance as being approximately as valuable, amortized over this fiscal year, as having one additional junior level software developer on staff – provided that someone (human or AI) is keeping it mostly busy for 8-10 hours a day. Some might derisively call this job babysitting, and accuse AIs of being little whiny baby robots that need a grownup to cut their food into little pieces, and change their diapers, and clean up their messes, and keep them from wandering out of their playpens.

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