u/throwaway0134hdj

Ive noticed at my company a trend of hiring a lot of juniors devs or ppl who don’t have dev backgrounds and having them exclusively churn out AI code. I see this as a way to undercut salaries, they hire junior or non-devs and pay a fraction of what they pay mid-senior. My questions are, is this a sustainable model? And how can I as someone with 5ish years experience stand out from this?

From a c-suite/management perspective they are all about cost savings, if they can hire a junior/non-dev using AI to build out their codebase why hire a mid-senior at 2-3x the price?

What is the selling point/secret sauce that warrants paying a mid-senior dev if a junior/non-dev can churn out code now with AI?

Ive noticed at my company a trend of hiring a lot of juniors devs or ppl who don’t have dev backgrounds and having them exclusively churn out AI code. I see this as a way to undercut salaries, they hire junior or non-devs and pay a fraction of what they pay mid-senior. My questions are, is this a sustainable model? And how can I as someone with 5ish years experience stand out from this?

From a c-suite/management perspective they are all about cost savings, if they can hire a junior/non-dev using AI to build out their codebase why hire a mid-senior at 2-3x the price?

What is the selling point/secret sauce that warrants paying a mid-senior dev if a junior/non-dev can churn out code now with AI?

Ive noticed at my company a trend of hiring a lot of juniors devs or ppl who don’t have dev backgrounds and having them exclusively churn out AI code. I see this as a way to undercut salaries, they hire junior or non-devs and pay a fraction of what they pay mid-senior. My questions are, is this a sustainable model? And how can I as someone with 5ish years experience stand out from this?

From a c-suite/management perspective they are all about cost savings, if they can hire a junior/non-dev using AI to build out their codebase why hire a mid-senior at 2-3x the price?

What is the selling point/secret sauce that warrants paying a mid-senior dev if a junior/non-dev can churn out code now with AI?

I read that Indian outsourcing made up 40% of commercial software development, is that still the case in the age of AI? Is work growing for Indian consultancies or slowing down?

I recall reading sth like 40% of companies outsource their core software development to Indian consultancies. How are they fairing with AI now being used more? Are they losing work, gaining work?

For novel solutions like CRUD apps where there is so much training data, you could say that’s effectively a solved problem. But it occurred to me that as these AI system advance, securing computer systems will be an even bigger issue. So that means any non-novel solutions or new solutions will be guarded like Fort Knox and not exposed to the public internet.

The only ways to really be able to protect your computer systems will be gatekeeping whatever intellectual property you have from it being trained on by an LLM. I’m pretty sure this is the future of development, where we significantly dial back from the whole public repo and free exchange of information like we did before, that whole open source ethos of Richard Stallman feels dead now.

What’s everyone thoughts? Do you think we will see a recoil in how we protect code online and prevent LLMs to train on them? We’ve basically given big AI companies a loaded gun by freely sharing all our knowledge. So I think devs will be much more defensive and guarded about proprietary code, but time will tell.

Maybe it’s just because I’m in this world and I see layoff news every other day. But why are we always at the whim of these big corporations? How come there is no sensible engineers in leadership positions pushing back on firing tens of thousands of devs at the press of a button?

It’s like we have zero protections at all here…

It’s not like doing development work is an easy job, even with AI it’s still tons of work. Are developers just total pushovers or something? Seems we just take abuse again and again.

I think of the ppl I did CS undergrad with, they were all introverted/shy/timid and wouldn’t fight back types, Is that the reason? Are we just a bunch of wimps that take abuse from others?

I don’t get it. We all know this job is difficult and the way we have ppl speak for us is just disgusting… say we can just be replaced by AI is an utter insult to the complexities of this job.

Why do we allow this? Why doesn’t anyone fight back? We desperately need representation, like a union. I know the situation is complex due to h1bs and offshoring but I think if domestic workers got together we wouldn’t always be the laughing stock of the white collar world. I’m sick of my cousins or friends always telling me how they worry about my career due to the news they see…

It should have never gotten to the point where we are a disposable block of workers simply because non-technical mangers decided sth on a whim.

There are two things here.

1. Humans are lazy
2. LLMs are “frozen” with whatever their training data has

Both of those facts paint a far different picture than what the media is portraying about LLMs being these innovative tools. As a thought experiment, imagine if we had LLMs back in 2000. We would freeze up till the point of the training data. We’d take a nosedive on innovation. By not having LLMs do all the work for us, humans had to use ingenuity to push beyond basic HTML scripts, but LLMs actually lock us into an existing framework and will stifle innovative thinking.

By just accepting whatever it outputs and not pushing beyond what’s already in its training data that will pose a real problem for innovation and critical thinking, and that’s not limited to coding either. In a way LLMs could be the worst thing that’s ever happened to us.

Thoughts?

I’ve run into this situation with managers and stakeholders many times recently where they ask “why can’t AI do it?”, I’m usually a bit thrown off by this question and don’t have a direct answer to it. Obviously I use LLMs and they are super useful but not a silver bullet. I feel totally blindsided by the question and its frequency, but such is the times. I’m looking for real responses to this question. For example I need to implement a url shortener or jwt authorization or a queue or any number of other features. So what’s stopping us from just asking AI to do it? I feel like it’s more complex but looking for everyone’s thoughts to this.

Go to LinkedIn or any AI subreddit and you’ll see the most exaggerated statements about AI. How AI is replacing jobs right and left/white collar apocalypse or “I replaced my entire team with AI”, AI is giving 300% productivity gains, I built my $10M company using AI. Of course none of them ever provide any evidence, you’ll see that same Anthropic chart shared countless times. But I don’t see them implementing anything, it’s just their words.

Why do we let them get away with it? I don’t understand how more people don’t call this out. Clearly AI is a great tool I use it all the time, but I also noticed it has becomes some sort of flex or competition where to prove how “AI-native” you are you have to basically make things up to show gains.

The gap between frontier models has been converging. Top players like OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google are rapidly approach performance parity. Meaning they are slowly becoming functionally the same, with performance differences becoming almost negligible. In Feb 2026 you saw the top five models within 2.5% of each other’s benchmarks. This is because they are all using similar architectures. They even show similar styles/personalities.

My question is, with core performance converging, what advantage does OpenAI have? Because despite their similar performance there is a huge cost disparity.

It’s bc this was the first time where I used software that genuinely felt like magic and I had zero idea how any of it worked. Up until Nov 2022 I could basically reason about how most software functioned and was built, this actually gave me a sense of stability. But with AI, this was totally foreign and hit me like a ton of bricks… Like a total blackbox mystery, and that bothered me so much, it still does. It also doesn’t help that the creators aren’t exactly transparent about it either and seem to want to obfuscate it more.

I think I speak for most devs when I say we pride ourselves in being able to figure things out and understand things. But AI isn’t like this, it’s seemingly incomprehensible, even to those who made it. This bothers me greatly. When I don’t understand how sth works it causes me a lot of anxiety.

The second part is how it’s marketed as a way to replace all white collar jobs. I think any sane person would have a knee jerk response to that, even if you aren’t in white collar work you know this boosts the economy. Again a stabilizing pillar being kicked out.

Lastly, are the claims of it being sentient or will become sentient (not going to get into the feasibility of that with LLMs), but this is another one of those things that sends me up a wall of existential dread and anxiety about sth that is magnitudes better at anything a human can do and what that means for the future of humanity.

It is all so disorienting.