alt Hacker NewsIn my experience, it's been the complete opposite. The very experienced engineers that are actually willing to use top of the line tooling are much better than they were before, including those that are over 40, and over 50.
Part of the practical degradation of traditional programmers over time has always been concentration and deep calculation, just like in chess. The old chess player knows chess much better than a 19 year old phenom, but they cannot calculate for that many hours at the same speed as before, so their experience eventually loses to the raw calculation. Maybe at 35, or at 45, but you are just not as good. Claude Code and Codex save you the computation, while every single instinct and 2 second "intuition", which is what you build with experience, is still online.
It's not just that it's a more fair competition: It's now unfair in the opposite direction. The senior that before could lead a team of 6 is now leading a team of agents, and reviewing their code just as before. Hell, it's easier to get the agent to change direction than most juniors around me, which will not be easy to correct with just plain, low-judgement feedback.
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But when a senior can do the job of 6 coworkers, what do you suppose will happen to the coworkers?
In farming, those who were replaced by tractors did not keep their jobs. What is different now?
> Part of the practical degradation of traditional programmers over time has always been concentration and deep calculation, just like in chess.
Fortunately SWEs have the architect path, which frequently rewards having lots of deep intuition even as the details of calculation continue to change. So one question that's urgent but unknowable until we get there is.. are we going to get good architects if they don't come up through the trenches? I'm not sure. All I know is that everyone has a war story about the least qualified ones that got the role without that experience.
Since intuition is what LLMs do more than calculation, it's worth mentioning that this is true but different. They have the collective unconscious of the internet, which isn't taste that comes from good/bad experience. Besides intuition what comes to mind is "good taste".. the actual foundation of good review and really the main job of senior positions in any technical field.
> The senior that before could lead a team of 6 is now leading a team of agents
you just confirmed the point that the author is making in the article:
the team of 6 is no longer needed,
and, logically, is therefore eliminated by the company
So yes, SWE still exists as a career for some, but their numbers might be reduced by 85%.
For me - I'm 43, and used to be an extremely productive Java/Swing developer after 15 years of experience, and I knew all my tools inside and out. But I no longer work at that company (which doesn't exist any more), and it takes me a lot longer to learn how to be effective with the new tools I'm using simply because I haven't had a decade to learn the ins and outs of the new environments I'm working with.
So AI saves me immense amounts of time figuring out how to write proper syntax, remembering the ins and outs of unit testing frameworks, etc. If I stick around for a year or three I'm sure I'll get much much faster and learn these tools better.
Stop with the anthropomorphizing, stop playing house. There is no team of agents, they are just tools and processes running in a computer for Christ’s sake. Blow away that one senior engineer and you have nothing. Better to have a team of 6.
> Part of the practical degradation of traditional programmers over time has always been concentration and deep calculation, just like in chess.
I don't know if I agree that this is the bottleneck.
What I can agree on is that as I have aged I now simply REFUSE to learn programming knowledge that has a half-life.
Phone programming? Nope. Front-end web programming framework? Oh, hell, no. Build system of the month? Piss right off. etc.
AI lets me fill in that kind of programming with "acceptable" (read: super crappy but I didn't have to think about it) results because that code won't exist in 5 years anyway due to its half-life.
> The senior that before could lead a team of 6 is now leading a team of agents, and reviewing their code just as before.
I don't see this in practice. Senior engineers can prompt Claude just as fast as junior engineers can. Claude can debug broken code at roughly the same speed regardless of who's pressing Enter.
In fact, I've basically stopped using agents for most of my work. It's far more valuable for me to help the junior engineers develop a better sense of what's good and right, than it is for me to sit and review Claude commits all day.