Comment by declan_roberts
2 days ago
These posts are funny to me because prompt engineers point at them as evidence of the fast-approaching software engineer obsolescence but the years of experience in software engineering necessary to even guide an AI in this way is very high.
The reason he keeps adjusting the prompts is because he knows how to program. He knows what it should look like.
It just blurs the line between engineer and tool.
The argument is that this stuff will so radically improve senior engineer productivity that the demand for junior engineers will crater. And without a pipeline of junior engineers, the junior-to-senior trajectory will radically atrophy
Essentially, the field will get frozen where existing senior engineers will be able to utilize AI to outship traditional senior-junior teams, even as junior engineers fail to secure employment
I don’t think anything in this article counters this argument
I don't know why people don't give more credence to the argument that the exact opposite thing will happen.
Right. I don’t understand why everyone thinks this will make it impossible for junior devs to learn. The people I had around to answer my questions when I was learning knew a whole lot less than Claude and also had full time jobs doing something other than answering my questions.
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If a junior engineer ships a similar repo to this with the help of AI, sure, I'll buy that.
But as of now, it's senior engineers who really know what they 're doing who can spot the errors in AI code.
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If I’ve learned anything from the past few decades, something completely unexpected and even weirder than both will happen.
> The argument is that this stuff will so radically improve senior engineer productivity that the demand for junior engineers will crater.
What makes people think that an increase in senior engineer productivity causes demand for junior engineers to decrease?
I think it will have the opposite effect: an increase in senior engineer productivity enables the company to add more features to its products, making it more valuable to its customers, who can therefore afford to pay more for the software. With this increase in revenue, the company is able to hire more junior engineers.
> It just blurs the line between engineer and tool.
I realise you meant it as “the engineer and their tool blend together”, but I read it like a funny insult: “that guy likes to think of himself as an engineer, but he’s a complete tool”.
> prompt engineers point at them as evidence of the fast-approaching software engineer obsolescence
Maybe journalists and bloggers angling for attention do it, prompt engineers are too aware of the limitations of prompting to do that.
I don't know why that's funny. This is not a post about a vibe coding session. It's Kenton Varda['s coding session].
later
updated to clarify kentonv didn't write this article
I think it makes sense that GP is skeptical of this article considering it contains things like:
> this tool is improving itself, learning from every interaction
which seem to indicate a fundamental misunderstanding of how modern LLMs work: the 'improving' happens by humans training/refining existing models offline to create new models, and the 'learning' is just filling the context window with more stuff, not enhancement of the actual model or the model 'learning' - it will forget everything if you drop the context and as the context grows it can 'forget' things it previously 'learned'.
When you consider the "tool" as more than just the LLM model, but the stuff wrapped around calling that model then I feel like you can make a good argument it's improving when it keeps context in a file on disk and constantly updates and edits that file as you work throguh the project.
I do this routinely for large initiatives I'm kicking off through Claude Code - it writes a long detailed plan into a file and as we work through the project I have it constantly updating and rewriting that document to add information we have jointly discovered from each bit of the work. That means every time I come back and fire it back up, it's got more information than when it started, which looks a lot more improvement from my perspective.
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The sequence of commits talked about by the OP -- i.e. kenton's coding session's commits -- are like one degree removed from 100% pure vibe coding.
Your claim here being that Kenton Varda isn't reading the code he's generating. Got it. Good note.
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I mean yeah, the very first prompt given to the AI was put together by an experienced developer; a bunch of code telling the AI exactly what the API should look like and how it would be used. The very first step in the process already required an experienced developer to be involved.