They can be great for focused tasks with very specific acceptance criteria. Especially in cases where you have broad test coverage that can verify nothing broke.
We already see bots that monitor repos to bump versions. I suspect we will see this expand to handle larger version bumps, minor issues, minor features. Basically junior dev learning tasks.
I really appreciate your optimism about a future world where you expect senior devs will be needed. How do we get the tech bros to share your vision for the future?
As it stands right now, until there is some radically new way that doesn't hallucinate implementations, is grounded in security rules and actually understands what it's doing in the larger context of the system it's working in I am not really worried about my job.
I stopped worrying about what techbro's think a long time ago. I saw one slinging a blockchain ai nft filesystem that will ingest and organize your documents for you on twitter yesterday.
If a company prefers small teams right now, at the cost of not having juniors to grow into seniors in the future, they are well within their rights to make that decision.
Might be an awful decision, might be a smart one, in any case there is no “we” here.
How is that any of my business? Well, I'm a software dev by trade and hobby, and I hack the planet on the side and advise multibillion $$$ companies on the security mistakes they make.
Even for the next 5 years I'd like to be able to have some capable humans in my teams.
Part of living in a society is considering the social impact of things. Such as the erosion of training opportunities for young talent.
Each business can make their own decisions, but someone should be thinking about the greater good. “Within your rights” doesn’t mean it’s a good thing, nor should that be the sole standard we set for members of our society. Same reason people hire interns and write technical blogs, open source code and sponsor school hackathons. Sometimes the greater good should be a consideration.
We already see bots that monitor repos to bump versions. I suspect we will see this expand to handle larger version bumps, minor issues, minor features. Basically junior dev learning tasks.