Blog post argues AI increased junior engineers' value, not erased it
A rebuttal essay to the 'AI ate the junior's marginal value' argument spreads across HN, Lobsters and Mastodon.
What to know
- The post is a direct rebuttal to a prior argument that 'AI ate the junior's marginal value.'
- Trindade's central example: an intern used AI to independently ship a long-requested but low-priority feature, demonstrating judgment beyond code generation.
- He argues AI has lowered training costs for early-career engineers while leaving trade-off decisions, customer context, and complexity management as distinctly human contributions.
- The post spread from the author's blog to Hacker News (42 points, 68 comments), Lobsters, and Mastodon reposts within the same day.
“AI did produce much of the code, and they owned the decisions.”
Francisco Trindade, blog author · franciscotrindade.me · Aug 17
Francisco Trindade Blog author / engineering leader
The record 2 articles and posts · last 30 days
What people are saying 19 voices from 1 site · best of 20 · verbatim
- Aug 21
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I once (before ai) had a junior waste two months trying and failing to make a relatively simple change. As it turns out she it never occurred to her that she might want to copy the newly compiled executable ("it's the thing visual studio builds for you when you press build!" I had to explain this) to the server she was trying to run it on. So she…
- Aug 20
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I work at a workplace where the seniors use AI, and I am chastised for asking questions. I end up using the AI as a learning tool instead.
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Not sure about that, I have seen hiring frozen, as smaller teams can deliver more, and most of the tasks one could give juniors like cleaning up code, documentation, unit tests, and co, are now basically automated.
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So surely there's more demand to hire junior engineers and their salaries have gone up?
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"They don’t know what skills they lack. They don’t even know what skills are required because they haven’t put the effort in."This is it.Evolving into a developer role was more or less directly proportional to the effort you put in. Before AI I used to ask applicants to the department I oversaw whether they have a GitHub Account with a project to…
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>It used to be that they would have been forced to seek help from a senior engineerYou still have standups, right?I'd be questioning why at the very least the team lead/manager isn't questioning the lack of progress during those meetings and immediately requesting a more senior engineer help out.Even before AI this was how it worked. Unless the…
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"The worst part is that AI is covering up their deficiencies. They don’t know what skills they lack. They don’t even know what skills are required because they haven’t put the effort in."This is the biggest issue with AI. It is incredible when in the right hands (Senior devs who know good fundamentals and know how to code) but really bad when in…
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> “…they aren’t being taught and they’re not learning from what the AI is producing because they don’t understand it. […] the ones who still interact with seniors to get help and actually learn.”You’re describing a gap between those who would otherwise fail in their jobs sooner, and those who already know what to do. Sounds like there is a new…
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It's setting them up for absolute failure.They use it like a crutch and are unable to think critically or do tasks manually.I wouldn't want to hire anyone to my team with that deficiency.This article is wrong.
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I think reducing junior value to something like time to first merge is playing with fire. Semblance of value is not value, and the value increase here, if there is any, is from the AI.I trust junior + claude significantly less than I trusted pre-AI juniors. I do not think it will age well to put so much pressure on juniors to make contributions…
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It largely depends on the person. We have several junior programmers who cannot solve a problem without FORTRAN. When the compiler can't produce efficient code, they just keep recompiling and failing. And I mean weeks to months late. Then rinse and repeat on the next routine. It used to be that they would have been forced to seek help from a…
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> This summer, we assigned the problem to an intern (that’s less tenure than a junior engineer). The intern led the development of this feature. They talked to the product manager to understand the problem and requirements. They wrote the design document on how to approach it, aligned with the team, and built it. Of course they did that with the…
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This is the direction many engineers (seniors included) are facing if they mostly rely on AI. You lose your skills, you become detached. We will all become 'architects'.
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Sort of like how there's a running joke, "this meeting could have been an email"; I think that for all the substance I found in this "4 minutes to read" blog post, it could have been a one-sentence comment in some discussion thread somewhere instead.
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It largely depends on the person. We have several junior engineers who cannot solve a problem without AI. When AI can’t solve it, they just keep trying and failing. And I mean weeks to months late. Then rinse and repeat on the next task. It used to be that they would have been forced to seek help from a senior engineer. Combine the teaching with a…
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This is something I've been thinking about the last couple days: how to get junior engineers to be valuable.I developed a system to help prepare for leet coding interviews so I never feel lost under pressure solving a problem again. It is like a debugger that steps through the code showing all the values of all the variables with data…
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> If the assumption is that AI is going to radically simplify the technical portion of the role, then the people who have started their careers with AI will be in the best spot once they have acquired the experience.This doesn't make sense - AI is to allow unskilled people to produce what was previously only produced by skilled people.IOW, how…
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> The junior engineer executes it, which nowadays means prompting it to an AI tool, and creating a pull request (PR). The PR receives feedback from more senior engineers. The junior engineer gets the feedback and takes it to the AI tool again, proposing changes.Yeah this part should not exist anymore. It doesn’t where I work.When I get a PR I just…
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I think it is less about junior/mid engineers, and more just about the kinds of work inexperienced/cheap developers are often doing: assembly line, JIRA-ticket-taker type development.This is especially impacting Indian tech workers in the US [0] since these are often the types of roles that InfoSys and other foreign tech consulting firms are…