Senior engineers might become 10-20 times more valuable with AI coding tools, because they can spot hallucinations and write precise prompts. But over-reliance erodes core skills. The real gain depends on experience and discipline.
Do AI coding tools make senior engineers more or less valuable?
I think coding tools are an exponential value add for the engineers, uh, with some caveats though. Over time, if you use them a lot, you might just lose some touch of the technical part of the engineering side. So you need to do it with caution, just like augmenting your work, not necessarily replacing the entire thing. So use them with care. It actually accelerates the development, but eventually, if you use them without any care, you might find that there's less value add.
Senior engineers, more valuable for sure. Definitely, I would say at least 10 or 20x now because they have an understanding of when there's hallucination and they can also be very specific about what they want out of the agent. I have found in our own experience that junior engineers actually struggle because there's a lot of things, whether it's hallucinations or their prompting is not specific enough. Yeah. And debugging with senior engineers has been a lot faster.
I actually think it makes senior engineers more valuable. That, that opinion has changed over time, to be honest, as a saying that Senior engineers have the sort of the background, they've got the architecture practices, they've got all the practices that they need to succeed and so they understand what good looks like. And so I guess AI helps you scale that at a much faster rate.
