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Julian Handl
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The future of junior developers

  • developers
  • ai
  • junior

AI can easily replace junior developers. This is a sentence you read quite often and to some extent I sadly have to agree. In pure code knowledge, strong models like Opus and Sonnet will easily surpass junior developers. They even surpass most senior developers.

Not just pure coding skills, also architecture, system design, debugging. So AI can replace the classic junior developer. That’s a fact. Now we land in the actual dilemma. If seniors don’t need their juniors to do the grinding and it’s not worth becoming a junior developer anymore, where do the next senior developers come from?

Just because we don’t need the classic junior developer anymore, doesn’t mean there is no place for a new kind of junior developer.

Hasn’t it been that way forever? In school I heard how my teacher fed punch cards to a computer. That’s how you would load a program back then. Have you done so in the last 5 years? No? Thought so. Because at some point someone built an abstraction layer on top of it so you were able to write code on the PC itself and load it via commands.

Then we had assembler to write low-level, high-performance code for machines. Then someone wrote an abstraction layer on top of it, so you can write C instead of assembler. No junior would write assembler anymore, because they could already use the next abstraction layer. So where did the assembler senior developers come from?

Some of them died, that’s the nature of life. Some of the juniors were crazy enough to still learn assembler. Now they are high paid seniors and can work wherever they want because they are very rare, but they still exist.

This leads me to think: If I can create better code faster with AI, why would a junior not do that in the first place? Do they need to remember 2016 csstricks or smashingmag articles about some crazy hacks? No, the AI can do that for them.

Maybe AI is just the next abstraction layer on top of the classic coding we have been used to for the last 20 years. Some people are crazy enough to still learn the classic style and we have a place for them in the software world.

We don’t have space for masses of classic juniors anymore, but we do have space for a new wave of juniors that can leverage AI to their advantage. The skillset of today’s juniors will dramatically shift.

  • Come up to speed in legacy codebases faster with AI
  • Setting up AI workflows to connect Jira, GitHub, Monday, … for end 2 end agent work
  • Building quick PoCs
  • Learning about architecture early on
  • and many more from the classic senior skillset

I think AI does not replace junior developers. AI is the next abstraction layer for a new kind of junior developers.