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Comment by davidmurdoch | Hacker News Reader

AI was supposed to get rid of juniors (and seniors, soon).

No, it was supposed to get rid of the seniors because they cost more and replace them with cheap juniors + AI. If you need some humans and you are a corpo bean counter, the cheaper the body the better.

But that wouldn't make any sense. It's not `plus`; it's `times`. AI is supposed to be a force _multiplier_, at least in the context of a complex organization and product (on small projects where vibe-coding is good enough I think AI is a massive plus!).

If a junior is about 50% as useful as a baseline senior, and today, AI's usefulness is only slightly better than the person using it, then 50% * 75% gives you output equal to about 37.5% of a senior. The junior just ships more junior-level output; and in a complex product and complex orgs, this just ends up being a drain on everyone else.

But in the hands of a senior, 100% (senior) * 125% (ai), we get a slightly better senior.

Its not a perfect analogy, and AI is new territory with lots of surprises. AI code reviews, have been separated from the confirmation bias of the driver of the AI, _are_ where I'm seeing the greatest impact on junior engineers. These AI reviews seem to be getting things closer to a level playing field.

I agree this does not make sense for you and me, but it makes sense for the corpo bean counters that don't understand how this works and they were told AI makes people better, so they need less people and less skilled people. It is not hard to get to the wrong conclusions based on the AI marketing materials.

I see the discussions around AI in my company (big, not IT but with several large IT departments) and even our MBA IT leaders believe all the buzzwords to the letter.

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