Comment by jjmarr
5 hours ago
A lot of senior engineering problems aren't gated by experience but by being trusted to coordinate large numbers of juniors.
Now that as a junior, I can spin up a team of AIs and delegate, I can tackle a bunch of senior level tasks if I'm good at coordination.
I think this is a fundamentally flawed perspective on the role and experience of a senior. It's a managers role to coordinate junior engineers. The difference between junior and senior is knowing where and when to do what at an increasing scale as you gain experience.
> It's a managers role to coordinate junior engineers.
Due to AI this is now my job. My company is hiring less juniors, but the ones we do hire are given more scope and coordination responsibilities since otherwise we'd just be LLM wrappers.
> The difference between junior and senior is knowing where and when to do what at an increasing scale as you gain experience.
Many juniors believe they know what to do. And want to immediately take on yuge projects.
e.g. I decided I want to rewrite my whole codebase in C++20 modules for compile time.
Prior to AI, I wouldn't be given help for this refactor so it wouldn't happen.
Now I just delegate to AI and convert my codebase to modules in just a few days!
At that point I discovered Clang 18 wasn't really optimized for modules and they actually increased build time. If I had more experience I could've predicted using half-baked C++ features is a bad idea.
That being said, every once in a while one of my stupid ideas actually pays off.
e.g. I made a parallel AI agent code review workflow a few months ago back when everyone was doing single agent reviews. The seniors thought it was a dumb idea to reinvent the wheel when we had AI code review already, but it only took a day or two to make the prototype.
Turns out reinventing the wheel was extremely effective for our team. It reduced mean time-to-merge by 20%!
This was because we had too many rules (several hundred, due to cooperative multitasking) for traditional AI code reviewers. Parallel agents prevented the rules from overwhelming the context.
But at the time, I just thought parallel agents were cool because I read the Gas Town blog and wasn't thinking about "do we have any unique circumstances that require us to build something internally?"