Microsoft and CMU team up to train early career software engineers

This is really what we're doing? This makes sense? Am I taking crazy pills?

If we freeze AI models at their current stage of development, then yes. If not, given the rate at which models are improving (compare Claude today to Claude 1 year ago), in 3 to 5 years software development could be fully automated.

Not that the new LLM-as-junior trend doesn't make it worse.

There is even some evidence that suggests senior roles are more in demand (and getting correspondingly higher pay too) which gels with the common observation that senior workers are more effective at managing the AI which is doing the work of (and hence displacing) junior workers.

Asking a chatbot or Google AI overviews should surface relevant studies.

Like the mass layoffs the last couple of years seemed to be primarily driven by the goofy hiring spree every company went on during the pandemic and the AI reasoning was only partly true and mostly a coverup for their mistakes in hiring in previous years.

On the other hand, the amount of garbage level devs that were being churned out of bootcamps and such in the years leading up to COVID was also due for some kind of correction and AI may be the catalyst for that correction.

I’ve been around devs making an easy 6 figures that did nothing but copy/paste code from the internet or other parts of the codebase and spew jank into the repo because management needs the work done yesterday.

Thanks! I've heard numerous examples of this. E.g. paint rollers, and later paint sprayers, made painting so much more efficient and cheaper that people wanted their houses and apartments painted more often, ultimately increasing house painter employment. But I didn't realize the phenomenon had a name.

It's my impression that the best way to be able to read code and distinguish good from bad is to write code. Get burned a few times and you know why certain patterns are a bad idea. You don't internalize that equally well from a powerpoint slide.

Compare this to math. Every successful mathematician has gone through the motions of proving certain basic theorems in math. Like Euclid's proof that there are infinitely many prime numbers. And then they went through related exercises. This was all learned with sweat. The statement above is akin to saying there is no point in doing any proofs by hand anymore, just read one and you will have sufficient understanding of mathematics and become a good mathematician. I don't think that's true. (And I also believe that many sw eng people would be better at their job had they groked the proof of the halting problem.)

And how you would know to do that, if you're not writing code?

Quite simply, I'm more mentally drained at the end of a day working with AI than I am a normal day of coding. There is still a lot of energy and thought that needs to go into what needs to be written.