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Comment by dr_kiszonka | Hacker News Reader

> I think it's weakening junior engineers' reasoning and coding abilities as they become reliant on it without having lived for long, or at all, in the before times.

I have a feeling there will be a serious shortage of strong "old-school" seniors in a few years. If students and juniors are reliant on AI, and we recruit seniors from our juniors, who will companies turn to when AI gets stuck?

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I wrote about this recently. I agree, though I think it might take a little longer. There will be a deskilling where the easy problems are solved by AI, so new grad workers won’t have gradual experience to grow into seasoned experts.

I’m looking forward to when the job market recovers, but I’m not looking forward to the prospect of a significant amount of future demand being in the realm of having to scale and maintain the AI slop code that’s being generated now.

It sounds like a pretty lucrative retirement plan, no matter how boring and frustrating the actual work would be.

Sadly, I don't think companies are going to hire graybeards to maintain AI slop code. They're just going to release low-quality garbage, and the bar for what counts as good software will get lower and lower.

I feel that (I can feel it in my own skin/life) that those 'oldies' with "ok" SME skills and "great" business acumen will be the ones harnessing the hordes of 'prompt engineers'.

It is like they will be the 'new nerds' and we will have the 'street-smarts'.

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