Will AI replace Junior Developers?

First there was the Nvidia's CEO, Jensen Huang:

learning to code should no longer be a priority of those looking to enter the tech sector.

Then a month later we had Devin:

If you heed the headlines drop out of your bootcamp, quit your apprenticeship and fear for your job.

In today's attention economy the sad reality is that headline of "the end of the developer" gets more clicks than "AI may assist developers to be more efficient."

In a recent podcast Kent Beck talked about how he has diligently refined the mechanics of his writing over the years.? His latest exploration Rent-A-Kent is a ChatGPT model trained on the body of his thoughts and writings.?? In the podcast Kent talks about using this model to create an executive summary for his book.

I'm not writing character by character or word by word.. but I'm still writing...(it's) the kind?of thought process that has always been going on in my head."??

Around 46 mins into the podcast Kent went on to talk about the key to this higher leverage being an articulation of intent that he had not previously expressed in his writing career.

Roller Coaster Tycoon was a popular PC game in which you build and manage your own theme park. 99% of the game Roller Coaster Tycoon was written in assembler. Kudos, but at that point you are practically thinking, talking and dreaming chip language!?A feat that could be completed by very few individuals on the planet. Contrast that low-level coding effort, two decades earlier, to the Unreal point and click Metahuman project.

Thankfully programming languages have evolved with additional abstractions making it easier to translate human thought into automation.

At S&A Academy we consider Software Development to be more than just the act of coding, it's about delivering value to humans and organisations.

We see Co-Pilot and LLMs just another tool, another abstraction that hopefully removes some of the cognitive load and undifferentiated heavy lifting towards delivering value.??

The non-negotiable is that Juniors decompose every line of code they write.? Copying pasting random code from the internet and StackOverflow has always been bad practice, even if it works, especially if it works! And blindly following a AI assistant is no different.

At S&A Academy we don't believe AI will replace Juniors or Software Developers, but we do believe it is even more critical to teach the skills to leverage tools, decompose problems, nurture the clarity of thought to articulate outcomes and ask questions to extract information from other humans.

This article is part of a series to launch S&A Academy's SummitToTech bridging the gap to industry.

Drop us a DM to discuss preparing your juniors for industry and industry relevant Software Development apprenticeships.

?(Bonus feature: The Toaster Project is a great parable on the realities of abstraction https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5ODzO7Lz_pw!)