>This has traditionally been offloaded by having seniors do the hard thinking then distill it into a jira ticket which could be handed off to an engineer that'd actually write the code and punch every hiccup into google along the way.

This is the theory, but I’ve never worked anywhere (and I’ve worked at a lot of places over 20 years) that actually did it like that in practice.

What tends to happen is that the EMs and PMs look at who’s free and give that person the task. This means that sometimes you get a senior leading a simple project and sometimes you get a junior leading/designing a complex project (usually with help from a very minorly technical PM).

Then the senior/staff/principal (often on a different “special” team) gets pulled in at the last minute to rescue the project.

If your company is highly product driven, you’ll often find that the juniors end up leaving projects more often than not because they will tell the PM exactly what they want to hear.

While the picture painted here is viceral... I think the reality is closer to this..

Before AI, most big software was desgined and originally writen by a few key (founder-esq) architects. But they can only add functionality at human speed, so the team grows, and the quality of engineer drops as the functionality footprint grows. Eventually the functionality is much bigger, but most of it was written by a much lower quality engineer, and thus the code (even if functionally correct) is less efficient and less clean, and the big refactors a talented architect would have done never happened, so it just got bigger and bigger and more unweildy and bug prone and inflexible - until some new talented architects see the waste and build a startup to displace it.

With AI, big software can be entirely written by 1-3 people, plus alot of agent usage. Which means it can be refactored more, and the design kept cleaner. But this only happens if those senior architects are actually paying attention and controlling the design. If the agents are heavily automated and subtasaking and controlling the design, then nothing much changed, because the agents themselves are no better than the "stackoverflow engineer".

Again, this ignores the second order effect of entirely gutting the personnel pipeline that is required to create new senior devs...

So without a training pipeline to provide experience to jr. Devs, in 15 years we will be hurting for senior devs to replace all the graybeards. Kind of like the fortran crisis of the last decade or so.... Just across an entire industry that supports every other industry....

I have been a software engineer for 8 years and not once I have had a jira ticket handed over to me by a senior engineer.

I have worked in startups before and currently work at bkng, and have friends at uber. Everywhere it is expected that the engineers will create their own tickets and refine them with the team. If you are in a product facing team, your PM could even help you with a PRD but I have not seen one in the last few years.

> This has traditionally been offloaded by having seniors do the hard thinking then distill it into a jira ticket which could be handed off to an engineer that'd actually write the code

I wish this were the extent of it nowadays. But for whatever reason, I've seen multiple really promising engineers get a hold of AI tools, and just outsource all of their thinking to it.

The self-infantalization is so bad that I was pair programming with a guy one day (partly to see how he was using AI) and watched him ask Claude if it makes sense to do X for every single decision.

I get using it as a form of linting... But you'll never learn how to be an independent developer if you constantly outsource your decision making. And it's disappointing too, because he was developing so rapidly as an engineer before Copilot came out.

I agree the time it takes to go from planning to deployed is condensing. I'm not sure the hand off is no longer necessary (though it admittedly often feels like it). Perhaps it means we need better ways of planning and collaborating faster and on larger features? So you still end up with a hand off, but it looks different, is maybe more detailed, or spans a wider implementation than we previously might?

I think AI is getting pretty good at generating the tickets as well. Not amazing, but it feels like ticket generation today is where code generation was a year ago.

I wonder if there's an agent harness that would work well for requirements gathering.

> I've heard some refer to this as a "nature is healing" scenario for the industry where if you only signed up for a high paycheck and didn't care to think critically about any of the work you're doing then this will be painful because that previously manual process has been automated. The floor of what's necessary to be considered valuable has been raised.

I feel like this is a bit of cope.

Right now you still need to have some skill to guide these things correctly to produce cohesive and functional products, but at the rate we've seen them improve I question how long this will remain true.

what is so 'hard thinking' about building a crud app

... And Django and React removed ("stole the jobs from under") the engineers handcrafting html and jQuery web pages/apps.