ETA: summary…
Author describes how agentic coding tools have disincentivized the developer training and mentorship pipeline that the software industry has implicitly relied on to produce seasoned developers, predicting that once the shortage is fully realized it could take years to reverse.
The solution proposed is for managers and senior developers to get ahead of this shortage by foregoing the immediate yet shortlived productivity maximization offered by the agent-multiplied-senior structure in favor of longterm sustainability by deliberately facilitating experience fan-out to juniors.
The methodology proposed is based on a successful nuclear engineering apprenticeship program carried out on active service naval submarines.
Hopefully my salary skyrockets to match the current RAM bullshit pricing…
My employer: best we can do is 3% raise.
Me: best I can do is quiet quitting. Enjoy
They don’t want to pay for engineer premium so they get basic or plus levels of efforts.
they dont want to hire more new to the field, because that would be more payroll they had to payout.
Newly graduated computer engineer here. I find this whole thing extremely depressing. Rant incoming.
Look at this passage from the article:
There’s a terrific writeup from the folks at FlintAI — their team is now 5 devs and 45 agents, all living in Slack. Nine agents per developer. The agents take roles — triage, deploy, review — the human steps in for the two decisions that actually matter (code review, release approval), and they report something like a 3x productivity bump.
I’m not sure what I imagined software engineers did before I graduated, but it wasn’t this. It is so soul crushing that even if I could get hired and accumulate experience to be a senior, the role I would have is to clean after LLMs. I like software development. I want to do the thing I studied to do.
It makes me wonder how these 5 senior engineers came to found a company that works like that. Do they not like writing the code? Do they have dreams of being rich? Do they believe the product they will produce is so essential that the process doesn’t matter?
Looking at their company (FlintAI), it makes a CRM with an integrated chatbot. The first result that came up when I searched FlintAI was another website named FlintK12 that makes an education oriented chatbot platform for teachers and students.
90% of software development jobs I see are for companies like these. Business gobbledygook software equivalent to the other 9999 business gobbledygook softwares. Job replacer 4000. Ai bot to do things that traditional software already do. Sell your knowledge to our ai bot. Help us steal information for our ai bot. Smart camera. Missile guidance system.
They all add 0 or negative value to the society, or that’s what it looks like to my baby brain.
Then there’s the obvious problem with the author’s proposal: Senior engineers aren’t something companies can sell. If they get rarer and more valuable, that value would be captured by the engineer. Which means the value of the experience that a Juinor earns from a job is also higher. So the value the Juinor provides to the company has decreased while the value they receive from the company increased. The only way I see this ending is Juinor wages plummeting and turning into unpaid internships or paid (the other way) ‘educational programs’.
It makes me wonder how these 5 senior engineers came to found a company that works like that. Do they not like writing the code? Do they have dreams of being rich? Do they believe the product they will produce is so essential that the process doesn’t matter?
I started programming when I was 14 years old, and turned 34 this year. That makes about 20 years.
Figuring out the syntax of a new language, the satisfaction of getting something to compile, and getting the “perfect” dev environment on my Arch Linux install was a lot of fun. I wouldn’t trade that experience for anything, but at this point I’ve gotten all the fulfillment I’m going to get from it.
Even before AI agents came along, I had already moved on to caring about the impact of the software: benefit to society (for my open source contributions); revenue to company (for half my day job); learning business skills to improve my earning potential (for the other half of my day job).
I would delegate the actual coding to junior engineers, and spend most of my time designing the higher level architecture and everything else needed to herd them into delivering the high level business objective.
Unfortunately, the current generation of AI agents (Opus 5, GPT 5.6 Sol) can do a somewhat similar role to those juniors. They don’t have the human element that made it fun to mentor the juniors, but they also don’t have feelings so I can give them feedback without worrying about coming off as a condescending asshole.
Dunno if that’s helpful at all to you, but if you’re genuinely wondering why a decent chunk of senior engineers are sticking around in the AI world, then there’s one perspective.
The only way I see this ending is Juinor wages plummeting and turning into unpaid internships or paid (the other way) ‘educational programs’.
I do have a slightly more positive note on that. Universities are slow to adapt their curriculums to new technologies, but they will eventually care that they’re producing graduates that provide so little value to companies that they’re unemployable.
They’ll begin to produce graduates that are the equivalent of today’s mid level and senior engineers. While I don’t know exactly what kind of education can instill in 4 years the essence of what took me decades to learn, I do know that pretty much every generation of humans have surpassed their parents so far. So I have every confidence you kids will figure it out.
i think they like other stems,. like biotech has done rely more on the senior level/scientists, of course they hire less of them, and not hire any, or barely any of the entry or junior level employees. so its a law of diminishing returns for a employer since they are mostly holding onto more “experience” employees.
Yeah part of why I posted it here was to avoid causing juniors unnecessary anxiety. It’s ultimately seniors who will need to have a plan in place to prevent this. And to be clear no senior worth their stripes wants this, because yes it would be soul sucking.
What would be the point? We’re already solving solved problems and reproducing known design patterns for someone else’s product. Money problems are solved pretty early in a developer’s career, so for most that motivation has diminishing returns. Meaningful work is harder to come by where the air gets thin, and developing people is where many of the best developers rediscover it. They won’t just give that up and spend every workday managing bots for nesting yacht riches.
Also new tools are just tools. Anyone who thinks they can replace human judgement needs to read more. Stakeholders will prioritize short-term profits because they’re free to be greedy shortsighted fools, but engineers who are any good at their jobs don’t have that luxury. They look ahead. They have a bench. Because that’s the job.
So i wouldn’t worry about this too much. If you want a takeaway from articles like this, something to give you an edge, maybe check out the new tools. Learn how to run them on basic local machines, how to train them, and understand what they can and (more importantly) can’t do. Even if it’s just to prove to yourself why they could never replace you.
I’m a senior software engineer (~20 years of experience) and job-hunting right now is killing me. Most want AI prompt experience of which I have zero. I don’t use coding agents. I’m also in deep rural Japan and most jobs here are killing remote (which is why I need to find one). I have citizenship in Canada and the US and remote jobs there aren’t interested for both time zone reasons and logistical ones (such as needing to use an EOR or similar which is cost, even though I go lower on my salary requirements). I’ve also mostly been doing golang for the last 6ish years which is not the most sought-after, and haven’t touched any modern UI framework. I’ve even decided I’m OK with basically giving up on the life I built in Japan (where I planned to retire) and applied for jobs in EEA countries to no avail since no one wants to do visa support at least in my target country. Shit is awful right now.
Articles about this looming problem aren’t new, but this one stood out to me for the author’s diligence in
- projecting the scope of the problem at scale convincingly without resorting to hyperbole,
- demonstrating the problem-solution framing engineering leads will inevitably need in order to convince clients and stakeholders (i.e., via market anticipation/contingencies/scalability rather than true yet unpersuasive appeals to the common good), and
- actually proposing a grounded methodology, with concrete reporting and workflow examples, toward rebuilding and maintaining the endangered training and mentorship pipelines in the context of agentic development instead of just pressing a hardliner easybutton before acknowledging its impossibility and declaring the illness terminal.
I’m particularly interested to hear critique of the author’s apprenticeship model, where it might fail, how it might be improved, etc.
Developer of over 20 years. Yeah job offers haven’t really changed last 5-6 years. Boom bust. They need us.
Just FYI. I’m thinking this article is completely ai written.
Definitely has some opus smell in several places. Then again, people who use specific model families at work seem to get infected by their lexical patterns. Not a fan.
Yeah your probably right. Its the:
X, not Y verbiage.
So their “solution” is for senior developers to keep giving work to junior developers… In order to prevent senior developer salaries from skyrocketing.
…the same junior developers that management and the investor class have stopped hiring.
Most seniors I know like mentoring newer engineers and would happily have more juniors on the team, but we don’t get to make hiring decisions. I don’t like that we have a glut of unemployed/underemployed new college grads and I feel bad for them, but I do not remotely care that management may have to pay me more than they’d like in 5 years because they decided they didn’t need a junior pipeline anymore. Play stupid games, win stupid prizes.
likely they are going to rely more on you or hire a smaller amount of senior devs, so they can avoid paying for junior or even entry level for fresh employees in the future.
Good point. I think most of the pitch here is to stakeholders and hiring managers, since they frame it explicitly as "buying senior-engineer futures at today’s price,” but I also think they’re wrong that “your seniors will hate it.” IMO that depends entirely on what kind of seniors you’ve brought onto the team.
If they’re motivated entirely by money or personal accomplishment, or they don’t play well with other developers, like the type we’ve all met who are eventually siloed on smaller projects, then yes I’d agree. They’ll hate it. But they never wanted to mentor juniors in the first place. I’d call those mid-level engineers.
None of the true seniors I’ve known could grind through repetitive agentic workflows daily without eventually hitting a brick wall of boredom. And I think most who gave it a little thought would realize this in advance. The emptiness and tedium of that work alone would be deal breaker. The only exception might be former seniors who are burned out and just want to retire ASAP, to do literally anything else.
But otherwise I don’t think most seniors want this scenario to play out. At all.
This is probably a bad thing, but I can live with general programming skills becoming the new COBOL programming skills.
I think it’s going to be a weird period where we’re expected to do everything that involves real engineering, anything “business centric”, and they’re going to be like “yes we gave you $500k annual, please provide the Secure And Well Architecture of the Olden Times… We need you to redesign a new system from scratch because the slop is losing us money”
…which I’m personally okay with, because I didn’t really save that much for retirement or plan on it anytime soon? I was getting more worried about grey hairs aging me out of software, but maybe they’ll age me back in.
