The Death of the Junior Developer

A lot of companies ask me, how can we tell which parts were written by the AI and which parts by the programmer? Well, if chat-oriented programming becomes the dominant modality for programmers, then LLMs will be writing the vast majority of all source code worldwide. That's a gargantuan shift, and it might even shake up the traditional software en

Gene, as an accomplished and senior author, is delighted with his productivity gains with his LLM of choice, Claude Opus. He showed me a big writing project that he'd just finished, in which he had spent easily 45+ minutes crafting the prompt, refining it until he had a 7500-word narrative that could serve as a starting point for rewriting, editing

Market forces are nudging everyone towards having senior writers who are also good prompt engineers: An arrangement that meets all of their needs faster and cheaper than hiring junior humans.

The problem, you see, is that there could be a future where they don't need junior associates anymore.

Increasingly, they need only senior associates, who (a) describe the tasks to be done; i.e., create the prompts, and (b) review the resulting work for accuracy and correctness. The high-end LLMs do so well with tasks normally fielded by junior asso