That's a question every current junior should be asking themselves.
If you want to be well-paid, you need to be able to distinguish yourself in some economically-useful manner from other people. That was true before AI and AI isn't going to make it go away. It may even in some sense sharpen it.
In another few years there's going to be large numbers of people who can be plopped down in front of a code base and just start firing prompts at an AI. If you're just another one of the crowd, you're going to get mediocre career results, potentially including not having a career at all.
However, here in 2025 I'm not sure what that "standing out in the crowd" will be. It could well be "exceptional skill in prompting". It could be that deeper understanding of what the code is really doing. It could be the ability to debug deeply yourself with an old-school debugger when something goes wrong and the AI just can't work. It could be non-coding skills entirely. In reality it'll be more than just one thing anyhow and the results will vary. I don't know what to tell you juniors except to keep your eyes peeled for whatever this will be, and when you think you have an idea, don't let the cognitively-lazy appeal of just letting the AI do everything stop you from pursuing it. I don't know specifically what this will be, but you don't have to be right the first time, you have time to get several licks at this.
But I do know that we aren't going to need very many people who are only capable of firing prompts at an AI and blindly saying "yes" to whatever it says, not because of the level of utility that may or may not have, but because that's not going to distinguish you at all.
If all you are is a proxy to AI, I don't need you. I've got an AI of my own, and I've got lower latency and higher bandwidth to it.
Correspondingly, if you detect that you are falling into the pattern of being on the junior programmer end of what this article is complaining about, where you interact with your coworkers as nothing but an AI proxy, you need to course correct and you need to course correct now. Unfortunately, again, I don't have a recipe for that correction. Ask me in 2030.
"Just a proxy to an AI" may lead to great things for the AI but it isn't going to lead you anywhere good!
That's a question every current junior should be asking themselves.
If you want to be well-paid, you need to be able to distinguish yourself in some economically-useful manner from other people. That was true before AI and AI isn't going to make it go away. It may even in some sense sharpen it.
In another few years there's going to be large numbers of people who can be plopped down in front of a code base and just start firing prompts at an AI. If you're just another one of the crowd, you're going to get mediocre career results, potentially including not having a career at all.
However, here in 2025 I'm not sure what that "standing out in the crowd" will be. It could well be "exceptional skill in prompting". It could be that deeper understanding of what the code is really doing. It could be the ability to debug deeply yourself with an old-school debugger when something goes wrong and the AI just can't work. It could be non-coding skills entirely. In reality it'll be more than just one thing anyhow and the results will vary. I don't know what to tell you juniors except to keep your eyes peeled for whatever this will be, and when you think you have an idea, don't let the cognitively-lazy appeal of just letting the AI do everything stop you from pursuing it. I don't know specifically what this will be, but you don't have to be right the first time, you have time to get several licks at this.
But I do know that we aren't going to need very many people who are only capable of firing prompts at an AI and blindly saying "yes" to whatever it says, not because of the level of utility that may or may not have, but because that's not going to distinguish you at all.
If all you are is a proxy to AI, I don't need you. I've got an AI of my own, and I've got lower latency and higher bandwidth to it.
Correspondingly, if you detect that you are falling into the pattern of being on the junior programmer end of what this article is complaining about, where you interact with your coworkers as nothing but an AI proxy, you need to course correct and you need to course correct now. Unfortunately, again, I don't have a recipe for that correction. Ask me in 2030.
"Just a proxy to an AI" may lead to great things for the AI but it isn't going to lead you anywhere good!