Overheard a junior dev say AI will replace all coding jobs in 5 years

I was grabbing coffee last Tuesday and heard two guys from a startup talking. One said he's not learning anything new because AI will write all the code soon. I've been a developer for 8 years and I've seen this same panic with outsourcing and no-code tools. What happened to just learning how the basics work before worrying about the end of the world? Anyone else dealing with juniors who have given up on actually learning to code?

3 comments

3 Comments

the_lee3d ago

Heard a similar thing from a kid at a meetup last month. He was telling me he doesn't bother learning debugging because AI will just fix his code later. I remember when everyone was saying the same thing about auto-complete tools back in 2015. Funny thing is, that kid spent two hours trying to get ChatGPT to fix a simple sorting issue while I fixed it in five minutes by just reading the error message. The basics still matter, even if the fancy tools change how we use them.

emerym364d ago

Oh boy, here we go again. I've been doing this for 20 years and it's the same cycle every time. The thing nobody talks about is that AI is already here and it's making us write more code, not less. Every time I see someone say code is dead I point out that the last two big breakthroughs in developer tools just made companies want more features faster. Junior devs who stop learning now are basically saying they don't want to understand what they're pasting into their projects, and that's how you end up with bugs you can't fix. The real skill isn't writing code by hand, it's knowing why the code works and what to do when it breaks.

ryan_barnes1d ago

Knowing why the code works" - that's the whole ballgame right there. I've seen too many devs lean on AI to write something, hit run, and when it fails they just keep feeding the error back in without actually reading what it's doing. You end up with this frankenstein code that barely works and nobody wants to touch later. The tools change every few years but the fundamentals don't. If you can't trace through a program and spot a typo or a logic error, you're not a developer, you're just a prompt engineer with extra steps.