A Research Preview of Codex

Some engineers on my team at Assembled and I have been a part of the alpha test of Codex, and I'll say it's been quite impressive.

We’ve long used local agents like Cursor and Claude Code, so we didn’t expect too much. But Codex shines in a few areas:

Parallel task execution: You can batch dozens of small edits (refactors, tests, boilerplate) and run them concurrently without context juggling. It's super nice to run a bunch of tasks at the same time (something that's really hard to do in Cursor, Cline, etc.)

It kind of feels like a junior engineer on steroids, you just need to point it at a file or function, specify the change, and it scaffolds out most of a PR. You still need to do a lot of work to get it production ready, but it's as if you have an infinite number of junior engineers at your disposal now all working on different things.

Model quality is good, but hard to say it's that much better than other models. In side-by-side tests with Cursor + Gemini 2.5-pro, naming, style and logic are relatively indistinguishable, so quality meets our bar but doesn’t yet exceed it.

> You still need to do a lot of work to get it production ready, but it's as if you have an infinite number of junior engineers at your disposal now all working on different things.

One issue with junior devs is that because they’re not fully autonomous, you have to spend a non trivial amount of time guiding them and reviewing their code. Even if I had easy access to a lot of them, pretty quickly that overhead would become the bottleneck.

Did you think that managing a lot of these virtual devs could get overwhelming or are they pretty autonomous?

it feels like openai are at a ceiling with their models, codex1 seems to be another RLHF derivative from the same base model. You can see this in their own self reported o3-high comparison where at 8 tries they converge at the same accuracy.

It also seems very telling they have not mentioned o4-high benchmarks at all. o4-mini exists, so logically there is an o4 full model right?

The advantage of Cursor is the reduced feedback loop where you watch it live and can intervene at any moment to steer it in the right direction. Is Codex such a superior model that it makes sense to take the direction of a mostly background agent, on which you seemingly have a longer feedback loop?

> Parallel task execution: You can batch dozens of small edits (refactors, tests, boilerplate) and run them concurrently without context juggling. It's super nice to run a bunch of tasks at the same time (something that's really hard to do in Cursor, Cline, etc.)

> It kind of feels like a junior engineer on steroids, you just need to point it at a file or function, specify the change, and it scaffolds out most of a PR. You still need to do a lot of work to get it production ready, but it's as if you have an infinite number of junior engineers at your disposal now all working on different things.

What's the benefit of this? It sounds like it's just a gimmick for the "AI will replace programmers" headlines. In reality, LLMs complete their tasks within seconds, and the time consuming part is specifying the tasks and then reviewing and correcting them. What is the point of parallelizing the fastest part of the process?

> We’ve long used local agents like Cursor and Claude Code, so we didn’t expect too much.

If you don't mind, what were the strengths and limitations of Claude Code compared to Codex? You mentioned parallel task execution being a standout feature for Codex - was this a particular pain point with Claude Code? Any other insights on how Claude Code performed for your team would be valuable. We are pleased with Claude Code at the moment and were a bit underwhelmed by comparable Codex CLI tool OAI released earlier this month.

They wrote "You still need to do a lot of work to get it production ready". So I would say it's not much better than real colleagues. Especially since junior devs will improve to a point they don't need your hand holding (remember you also were a junior at some point), which is not proven will happen with AI tools.

Post realizing CC can operate same code base, same file tree on different terminals instances, it's been a significant unlock for us. Most devs have 3 running concurrently. 1. master task list + checks for completion on tasks. 2. operating on current task + documentation. 3. side quests, bugs, additional context.

rinse and repeat once task done, update #1 and cycle again. Add in another CC window if need more tasks concurrently.

downside is cost but if not an issue, it's great for getting stuff done across distributed teams..

You don't need to be nice to your virtual junior devs. Saves quite a lot time too.

As long as I spend less time reviewing and guiding than doing it myself it's a win for me. I don't have any fun doing these things and I'd rather yelling at a bunch of "agents". For those who enjoy doing bunch of small edits I guess it's the opposite.

> Each task is processed independently in a separate, isolated environment preloaded with your codebase. Codex can read and edit files, as well as run commands including test harnesses, linters, and type checkers. Task completion typically takes between 1 and 30 minutes, depending on complexity, and you can monitor Codex’s progress in real time.

do you have then instance 2 and 3 listening to instance 1 with just a prompt? or how does this work?

If you aren't hiring junior engineers to do these kinds of things, where do you think the senior engineers you need in the future will come from?

My kid recently graduated from a very good school with a degree in computer science and what she's told me about the job market is scary. It seems that, relatively speaking, there's a lot of postings for senior engineers and very little for new grads.

My employer has hired recently and the flood of resumes after posting for a relatively low level position was nuts. There was just no hope of giving each candidate a fair chance and that really sucks.

My kid's classmates who did find work did it mostly through personal connections.

The never ending march of progress.

It's probably over for these folks.

There will likely(?, hopefully?) be new adjacent gradients for people to climb.

In any case, I would worry more about your own job prospects. It's coming for everyone.

> If you aren't hiring junior engineers to do these kinds of things, where do you think the senior engineers you need in the future will come from?

Unfortunately this is not how companies think. I read somewhere more than 20 years ago about outsourcing and manufacturing offshoring. The author basically asked the same: if we move out the so-called low-end jobs, where do we think we will get the senior engineers? Yet companies continued offshoring, and the western lost talent and know-how, while watching our competitor you-know-who become the world leader in increasingly more industries.

> If you aren't hiring junior engineers to do these kinds of things, where do you think the senior engineers you need in the future will come from?

They'll probably just need to learn for longer and if companies ever get so desperate for senior engineers then just take the most able/experienced junior/mid level dev.

But I'd argue before they do that if companies can't find skilled labour domestically they should consider bringing skilled workers from abroad. There are literally hundreds of millions of Indians who got connected to the internet over the last decade. There's no reason a company should struggle to find senior engineers.

> If you aren't hiring junior engineers to do these kinds of things, where do you think the senior engineers you need in the future will come from?

Money number must always go up. Hiring people costs money. "Oh hey I just read this article, sez you can have A.I. code your stuff, for pennies?"

It's happening to Hollywood right now. In the past three years, since roughly 2022, the majority of IATSE folks (film crew, grips, etc.) have seen their jobs disappear to Eastern Europe where the labor costs one tenth of what it does here. And there are no rules for maximum number of consecutive hours worked.

> Parallel task execution: You can batch dozens of small edits (refactors, tests, boilerplate) and run them concurrently without context juggling.

This is also part of a recent update to Zed. I typically use Zed with my own Claude API key.

In my experience, it still does take quite a bit of time (minutes) to run a task on these agentic LLMs (especially with the latest reasoning models), and in Cursor / Cline / other code editor versions of AI, it's enough time for you to get distracted, lose context, and start working on another task.

So the benefit is really that during this "down" time, you can do multiple useful things in parallel. Previously, our engineers were waiting on the Cursor agent to finish, but the parallelization means you're explicitly turning your brain off of one task and moving on to a different task.

A single response can take a few seconds, but tasks with agentic flows can be dozens of back and forths. I've had a fairly complicated Roo Code task take 10 minutes (multiple subtasks).

Seems likely that they are waiting to release o4 full results until the gpt-5 release later this year, presumably because gpt-5 is bundled with a roughly o4 level reasoning capability, and they want gpt-5 to feel like a significant release.

Is Zed managing the containerized dev environments, or creating multiple worktrees or anything like that? Or are they all sharing the same work tree?

As far as I know, they are sharing a single work tree. So I suppose that could get messy by default.

That said, it might be possible to tell each agent to create a branch and do work there? I haven't tried that.

I haven't seen anything about Zed using containers, but again you might be able to tell each agent to use some container tooling you have in place since it can run commands if you give it permission.

Counter-point A: AI coding assistance tools are rapidly advancing at a clip that is inarguably faster than humans.

Counter-point B: AI does not get tired, does not need space, does not need catering to their experience. AI is fine being interrupted and redirected. AI is fine spending two days on something that gets overwritten and thrown away (no morale loss).

I don't think jobs are necessarily a good plan at all anymore. Figure out how to leverage AIs and robots as cheap labor, and sell services or products. But if someone is trying to get a job, I get the impression that networking helps more than anything.

ahh, the classic “i shall please my investors next quarter while ignoring reality, so i can disappoint my shareholders in 10 years”. lol.

As you say, happens all the time. Also doesn’t make sense because so few people are buying individual stocks anyway. Goal should be to consistently outperform over the long term. Wall street tends to be very myopic.

Thinking long term is a hard concept for the bean counters at these tech companies i guess…

Counter-counter-point A: If I work with a human Junior and they make an error or I familiarize them with any quirk of our workflow, and I correct them, they will recall that correction moving forward. An AI assistant either will not remember 5 minutes later (in a different prompt on a related project) and repeat the mistake, or I'll have to take the extra time to code some reminder into the system prompt for every project moving forward.

Advancements in general AI knowledge over time will not correlate to improvements in remembering any matters as colloquial as this.

Counter-counter-point B: AI absolutely needs catering to their experience. Prompter must always learn how to phrase things so that the AI will understand them, adjust things when they get stuck in loops by removing confusing elements from the prompt, etc.

There aren't going to be senior engineers in the future.

I'm definitely wary of the concept of dismissing courtesy when working with AI agents, because I certainly don't want to lose that habit when I turn around and have to interact with humans again.

I believe cursor now supports parallel tasks, no? I haven't done much with it personally but I have buddies who have.

If you want one idiot's perspective, please hyper-focus on model quality. The barrier right now is not tooling, it's the fact that models are not good enough for a large amount of work. More importantly, they're still closer to interns than junior devs: you must give them a ton of guidance, constant feedback, and a very stern eye for them to do even pretty simple tasks.

I'd like to see something with an o1-preview/pro level of quality that isn't insanely expensive, particularly since a lot of programming isn't about syntax (which most SotA modls have down pat) but about understanding the underlying concepts, an area in which they remain weak.

Atp I really don't care if the tooling sucks. Just give me really, really good mdoels that don't cost a kidney.

This is a bit of a game theory problem. "Training senior engineers" is an expensive and thankless task: you bear essentially all the cost, and most of the total benefit accrues to others as a positive externality. Griping at companies that they should undertake to provide this positive externality isn't really a constructive solution.

I think some people are betting on the fact that AI can replace junior devs in 2-5 years and seniors in 10-20, when the old ones are largely gone. But that's sort of beside the point as far as most corporate decision-making.

Yeah, the value of the typical job application meta is trending to zero very quickly. Entrepreneurship has a steep learning curve; you should start learning it as soon as possible. Don't waste your time learning to run a straight line - we're entering off-road territory.

CTO of an AI agents company (which has worked with AI labs) says agents works fine. Nothing new under the sun.

With Agentic RL training and sufficient data, AI operating at the level of average senior engineers should become plausible in a couple to a few years.

Top-tier engineers who integrate a deep understanding of business and user needs into technical design will likely be safe until we get full-fledged AGI.

It's his daughter. He is worried about his daughter first and foremost. Weird reply.

Hiring of juniors is basically dead these days and it has been like this for about 10 years and I hate it. I remember when I was a junior in 2014 there were actually startups who would hire cohorts of juniors (like 10 at a time, fresh out of CS degree sort of folks with almost no applied coding experience) and then train them up to senior for a few years, and then a small number will stay and the rest will go elsewhere and the company will hire their next batch of juniors. Now no one does this, everyone wants a senior no matter how simple the task. This has caused everyone in the industry to stuff their resume, so you end up in a situation where companies are looking for 10 years of experience in ecosystems that are only 5 years old.

That said, back in the early 00s there was much more of a culture of everyone is expected to be self-taught and doing real web dev probably before they even get to college, so by the time they graduate they are in reality quite senior. This was true for me and a lot of my friends, but I feel like these days there are many CS grads who haven't done a lot of applied stuff. But at the same time, to be fair, this was a way easier task in the early 00s because if you knew JS/HTML/CSS/SQL, C++ and maybe some .NET language that was pretty much it you could do everything (there were virtually no frameworks), now there are thousands of frameworks and languages and ecosystems and you could spend 5+ years learning any one of them. It is no longer possible for one person to learn all of tech, people are much more specialized these days.

But I agree that eventually someone is going to have to start hiring juniors again or there will be no seniors.

That sounds like a dangerous bet.

I guess the industry leaders think we'll not need senior engineers either as capabilities evolve.

But also, I think this underestimates significantly what junior engineers do. Junior engineers are people who have spent 4 to 6 years receiving a specialised education in a university - and they normally need to be already good at school math. All they lack is experience applying this education on a job - but they are professionals - educated, proactive and mostly smart.

The market is tough indeed, and as much it is tough for a senior engineer like myself, I don't envy the current cohort of fresh grads. It being tough is only tangentially related to the AI though. Main factor is the general economic slowdown, with AI contributing by distracting already scarce investment from non-AI companies and producing a lot of uncertainty in how many and what employees companies will need in the future. Their current capabilities are nowhere near to having a real economic impact.

Wish your kid and you a lot of patience, grit and luck.

Do you still think there will be a gpt-5? I thought the consensus was GPT-5 never really panned out and was released with little fanfare as 4.1.

So basically all education facilities should go abroad too if no one needs Western fresh grads. Will provide a lot of shareholder value, but there are some externalities too.

This is exactly the problem. The top level executives are setting up to retire with billions in the bank, while the workers develop their own replacements before they retire with millions in the bank. Senior developers will be mostly obsolete too.

I have mentored junior developers and found it to be a rewarding part of the job. My colleagues mostly ignore juniors, provide no real guidance, couldn't care less. I see this attitude from others in the comments here, relieved they don't have to face that human interaction anymore. There are too many antisocial weirdos in this industry.

Without a strong moral and cultural foundation the AGI paradigm will be a dystopia. Humans obsolete across all industries.

Sounds like a bet a later CEO will need to check.

It looks we are in this interesting cycle: millions of engineers contribute to open-source on github. The best of our minds use the code to develop powerful models to replace exactly these engineers. In fact, the more code a group contributes to github, the easier it is for the companies to replace this group. Case in point, frontend engineers are impacted most so far.

Does this mean people will be less incentivized to contribute to open source as time goes by?

P.S., I think the current trend is a wakeup call to us software engineers. We thought we were doing highly creative work, but in reality we spend a lot of time doing the basic job of knowledge workers: retrieving knowledge and interpolating some basic and highly predictable variations. Unfortunately, the current AI is really good at replacing this type of work.

My optimistic view is that in long term we will have invent or expand into more interesting work, but I'm not sure how long we will have to wait. The current generation of software engineers may suffer high supply but low demand of our profession for years to come.

I find myself thinking about juniors vs AI as babies vs cats. A cat is more capable sooner, you can trust it when you leave the house for two hours, but it'll never grow past shitting in a box and needing to be fed.

India coming online just in time for AI is awkward

> P.S., I think the current trend is a wakeup call to us software engineers. We thought we were doing highly creative work, but in reality we spend a lot of time doing the basic job of knowledge workers: retrieving knowledge and interpolating some basic and highly predictable variations. Unfortunately, the current AI is really good at replacing this type of work.

Most of the waking hours of most creative work have this type of drudgery. Professional painters and designers spend most of their time replicating ideas that are well fleshed-out. Musicians spend most of their time rehearsing existing compositions.

There is a point to be made that these repetitive tasks are a prerequisite to come up with creative ideas.

As I see it, it's actually the only safe bet.

Case 1: you keep training engineers.

Case 1.1: AGI soon, you don't need juniors or seniors besides a very few. You cost yourself a ton of money that competitors can reinvest into R&D, use to undercut your prices, or return to keep their investors happy.

Case 1.2: No AGI. Wages rise, a lot. You must remain in line with that to avoid losing those engineers you trained.

Case 2: You quit training juniors and let AI do the work.

Case 2.1: AGI soon, you have saved yourself a bundle of cash and remain mostly in in line with the market.

Case 2.2: no AGI, you are in the same bidding war for talent as everyone else, the same place you'd have been were you to have spent all that cash to train engineers. You now have a juicier balance sheet with which to enter this bidding war.

The only way out of this, you can probably see, is some sort of external co-ordination, as is the case with most of these situations. The high-EV move is to quit training juniors, by a mile, independently of whether AI can replace senior devs in a decade.

I'm sorry. I was skimming. I had no idea he mentioned his kid.

I was running a quick errand between engineering meetings and saw the first few lines about hiring juniors, and I wrote a couple of comments about how I feel about all of this.

I'm not always guilty of skimming, but today I was.

This hyper-fixation on replacing engineers in writing code is hilarious, and dangerous, to me. Many people, even in tech companies, have no idea how software is built, maintained, and run.

I think instead we should focus on getting rid of managers and product owners.

I share your worries, but the time horizon for the supply of senior engineers drying up is just too long for companies to care at this time, in particular if productivity keeps increasing. And it’s completely unclear what the state of the art will be in 20 years; the problem might mostly solve itself.

> doing the basic job of knowledge workers

If you extrapolate and generalize further... what is at risk is any task that involves taking information input (text, audio, images, video, etc.), and applying it to create some information output or perform some action which is useful.

That's basically the definition of work. It's not just knowledge work, it's literally any work.

The real judge will be survivorship bias and as a betting man, I might think product owners are the ones with the entrepreneurial spirit to make it to the other side.

As much as I support community developed software and "free as in freedom", "Open Source" got completely perverted into tricking people to work for free for huge financial benefits for others. Your comment is just one example of that.

For that reason all my silly little side projects are now in private repos. I dont care the chance somebody builds a business around them is slim to none. Dont think putting a license will protect you either. You'd have to know somebody is violating your license before you can even think about doing anything and that's basically impossible if it gets ripped into a private codebase and isnt obvious externally.

> I have mentored junior developers and found it to be a rewarding part of the job.

That's really awesome. I hope my daughter finds a job somewhere that values professional development. I'd hate for her to quit the industry before she sees just how interesting and rewarding it can be.

I didn't have many mentors when starting out, but the ones I had were so unbelievably helpful both professionally and personally. If I didn't have their advice and encouragement, I don't think I'd still be doing what I'm doing.

I disagree. AI have shown to most capable in what we consider creative jobs. Music creation, voice acting, text/story writing, art creation, video creation and more.

> I have mentored junior developers and found it to be a rewarding part of the job.

Can totally relate. Unfortunately the trend for all-senior teams and companies has started long before ChatGPT, so the opportunities have been quite scarce, at least in a professional environment.

In my experience in Cursor with Claude 3.5 and Gemini 2.5, if an agent has run for more than a minute it has usually lost the plot. Maybe model use in Codex is a new breed?

> "Open Source" got completely perverted into tricking people to work for free for huge financial benefits for others

I'm quite conflicted on this assessment. On one hand, I was wondering if we would get better job market if there were not much open-sourced systems. We may have had a much slower growth, but we would see our growth last for a lot more years, which mean we may enjoy our profession until our retirement and more. On the other hand, open source did create large cakes, right? Like the "big data" market, the ML market, the distributed system market, and etc. Like the millions of data scientists who could barely use Pandas and scipy, or hundreds of thousands of ML engineers who couldn't even bother to know what semi positive definite matrix is.

Interesting times.

it’s obviously intensely correlated: the vast majority of scenarios either both are replaced or neither

If you mean create as in literally, sure. But not in being creative. AI can't solve novel problems yet. The person you're replying to obviously means being creative not literally creating something.

To be clear, we still hire engineers who are early in their careers (and we've found them to be some of the best folks on our team).

All the same principles apply as before: smart, driven, high ownership engineers make a huge difference to a company's success, and I find that the trend is even stronger now than before because of all the tools that these early career engineers have access to. Many of the folks we've hired have been able to spin up on our codebase much faster than in the past.

We're mainly helping them develop taste for what good code / good practices look like.

> we still hire engineers who are early in their careers

That's really great to hear.

Your experience that a new engineer equipped with modern tools is more effective and productive than in the past is important to highlight. It makes total sense.

AI might play a role here. But there's also a lot of economic uncertainty.

It's not long ago when the correction of the tech job market started, because it got blown up during and after covid. The geopolitical situation is very unstable.

I also think there is way too much FUD around AI, including coding assistants, than necessary. Typically coming either from people who want to sell it or want to get in on the hype.

Things are shifting and moving, which creates uncertainty. But it also opens new doors. Maybe it's a time for risk takers, the curious, the daring. Small businesses and new kinds of services might rise from this, like web development came out of the internet revolution. To me, it seems like things are opening up and not closing down.

Besides that, I bet there are more people today who write, read or otherwise deal directly with assembly code than ever before, even though we had higher level languages for many decades.

As for the job market specifically: SWE and CS (adjacent) jobs are still among the fastest growing, coming up in all kinds of lists.

Much like everything in the economy currently, externalities are to be shouldered by "others" and if there is no "other" in aggregate, well, it's not our problem. Yet.

More recent models are not without drive and are not stupid either.

There’s still quite a bit of a gap in terms of trust.

I recently read an article about the US having a relatively weak occupational training.

To contrast, CH and GER are known to have very robust and regulated apprenticeship programs. Meaning you start working at a much earlier age (16) and go to vocational school at the same time for about 4 years. This path is then supported with all kinds of educational stepping stones later down the line.

There are many software developers who went that route in CH for example, starting with an application development apprenticeship, then getting to technical college in their mid 20's and so on.

I think this model has a lot of advantages. University is for kids who like school and the academic approach to learning. Apprenticeships plus further education or an autodidactic path then casts a much broader net, where you learn practical skills much earlier.

There are several advantages and disadvantages of both paths. In summary I think the academic path provides deeper CS knowledge which can be a force multiplier. The apprenticeship path leads to earlier high productivity and pragmatism.

My opinion is that in combination, both being strongly supported paths, creates more opportunities for people and strengthens the economy as a whole.

What is the qualifier for this? Didn't one of the models recently create a "novel" algorithm for a math problem? I'm not sure this holds water anymore.

This whole "LLMs == junior engineers" is so pedantic. Don't we realize that the same way senior engineers thinkg that LLMs can just replace junior engineers, high-level executives think that LLMs will soon replace senior ones?

Junior engineers are not cattle. They are the future senior ones, they bring new insights into teams, new perspectives; diversity. I can tell you the times I have learnt so many valuable things from so-called junior engineers (and not only tech-wise things).

LLMs have their place, but ffs, stop with the "junior engineer replacement" shit.

You need someone thats technical to look at the agent output, senior engineers will be around. Junior engineers are certainly being replaced

I know about this system, but I am not convinced it can work in such a dynamic field as software. When tools change all the time, you need strong fundamentals to stay afloat - which is what universities provide.

Vocational training focusing on immediate fit for the market is great for companies that want to extract maximal immediate value from labour for minimal cost, but longer term is not good for engineers themselves.

She can try to reach out to possible mentors / people on Linkedin. A bit like cold calling. It works, people (usually) want to help and don't mind sharing their experiences / tips. I know I have helped many random linedin cold messages from recent grads/people in uni

I think the bigger problem, that started around 2022 is much lower volume of jobs in software development. Projects were shutdown, funding was retracted, even the big wave of migrations to the cloud died down.

Today startups mostly wrap LLMs as this is what VCs expect. Larger companies have smaller IT budgets than before (adjusted for inflation). This is the real problem that causes the jobs shortage.

Thanks, Sherlock. Now, tell me, when senior engineers start to retire, who will replace them? Ah, yeah, I can hear you say "LLMs!". And LLMs will rewrite themselves so we won't need seniors anymore writing code. And LLMs will write all the code companies need. So obvious, of course. We won't need a single senior because we won't have them, because they are not hired these days anymore. Perfect plan.

I think it'll be great if you're working in software not for a software company.

Same, mine is about to graduate with a CS masters from a great school. Couldn't get any internships, and is now incredibly negative about ever being able to find work, which doesn't help. We're pretty much looking at minimum wage jobs doing tech support for NGOs at this point (and the current wave of funding cuts from Federal government for those kind of orgs is certainly not going to help with that).

As a dev, if you try taking away my product owners I will fight you. Who am I going to ask for requirements and sign-offs, the CEO?

It depends what level you ask them to work on, but I agree, all of my agent coding is active and completed in usually <15 seconds.

> But at the same time, to be fair, this was a way easier task in the early 00s

The best junior I've hired was a big contributor to an open source library we were starting to use.

I think there's still lots of opportunity for honing your skill, and showing it off, outside of schools.

to answer my own questions , it is actually laid out in chapter 6 of https://www.anthropic.com/engineering/claude-code-best-pract...

What then ends up happening is that companies how fall behind in R&D eventually lose market share and get replaced by more agile competitors.

But this does not happen in industry verticals that are protected by regulation (banks) or national interest (Boring).

Your architect, principal engineer etc. (one spot-on job title I've seen is "product architect"), who in turn talks to the senior management. Basically an engineer with a talent and experience for building products rather than a manager with superficial understanding of engineering. I think the most ambitious teams have someone like this on top - or at least around

TBH the people I see parroting the LLM=junior engineer BS are almost always technically incompetent or so disconnected at this point from what's happening on the ground that they wouldn't know either way.

I've been using the codex agent since before this announcement btw along with most of the latest LLMs. I literally work in the AI/ML tooling space. We're entering a dangerous world now where there's super useful technology but people are trying to use it to replace others instead of enhance them. And that's causing the wrong tools to be built.

Perhaps the role will merge into one, and will replace a good chunk of those jobs.

E.g.:

If we have 10 PMs and 90 devs today, that could be hypothetically be replace by 8 PM+Dev, 20 specialized devs, and 2 specialized PMs in the future.

I feel for your daughter. I can totally see how tools like this will destroy the junior job market.

But I also wonder (I'm thinking out loud here, so pardon the raw unfiltered thoughts), if being a junior today is unrecognizable.

Like for example, that whatever a "junior" will be now, will have to get better at thinking at a higher level, rather than the minute that we did as juniors (like design patterns and all that stuff).

So maybe the levels of abstraction change?

> Does this mean people will be less incentivized to contribute to open source as time goes by?

personally, I completely stopped 2 years ago

it's the same as the stack overflow problem: the incentive to contribute tends towards zero, at which point the plagiarism machine stops improving

> AI have shown to most capable in what we consider creative jobs

no it creates shit thats close enough for people who are in a rush and dont care.

ie, you need artwork for shit on temu, boom job done.

You want to make a poster for a bake sale, boom job done.

Need some free music that sounds close enough to be swifty, but not enough to get sued, great.

But as an expression of creativity, most people cant get it to do that.

Its currently slightly more configurable clipart.

An interesting thing to consider is that Codex might get people to be better at delegating, which might improve the effectiveness of hiring junior engineers. Because the senior engineers will have better skills at delegating, leading to a more effective collaboration.

Now do open science.

More generally, specialty knowledge is valuable. From now on, all employees will be monitored in order to replace them.

You’re looking at it from the point of view of an individual company. I’m seeing it as a risk for the entire industry.

Senior engineers are already very well paid. Wages rising a lot from where they already are, while companies compete for a few people, and those who can’t afford it need to lean on AI or wait 10+ years for someone to develop with equivalent expertise… all of this sounds bad for the industry. It’s only good for the few senior engineers that are about to retire, and the few who went out of their way to not use AI and acquire actual skills.

> If you aren't hiring junior engineers..., where do you think the senior engineers you need in the future will come from?

This problem might be new to CS, but has happened to other engineers, notably to MechE in the 90's, ChemE in 80's, Aerospace in 70's, etc... due to rapid pace of automation and product commoditization.

The senior jobs will disappear too, or offshored to a developing country: Exxon (India 152 - 78 US) https://jobs.exxonmobil.com/ Chevron (India 159 - 4 US) https://careers.chevron.com/search-jobs

i think there's an opportunity here

a lot of junior eng tasks don't really help you become a senior engineer. someone needs to make a form and a backend API for it to talk to, because it's a business need. but doing 50 of those doesn't really impart a lot of wisdom

same with writing tests. you'll probably get faster at writing tests, but that's about it. knowing that you need the tests, and what kinds of things might go wrong, is the senior engineer skill

with the LLMs current ability to help people research a topic, and their growing ability to write functioning code, my hunch is that people with the time to spare can learn senior engineer skills while bypassing being a junior engineer

convincing management of that is another story, though. if you can't afford to do unpaid self-directed study, it's probably going to be a bumpy road until industry figures out how to not eat the seed corn

Graduating as a junior is just not enough in a more competitive market like there is now. I don’t think it is related to anything else. If you can hire a developer that is spending 10x time coding or a developer that has studied and graduated, this is not much of a choice. If you don’t have the option than you might go with a junior

Are you payed to say this? Sorry for my frankness but I dont understand how you can have multiple agents concurrently editing the same areas of code without any sort of merge conflicts later.

> It seems that, relatively speaking, there's a lot of postings for senior engineers and very little for new grads.

That's been the case for most of the last 15 years in my experience. You have to follow local job markets, get in through an internship, or walk in at local companies and ask. Applying en mass can also help, and so does having some code on GitHub to show off.

With so many graduates looking for a job why don't they bang together and do something. If not for money then just to show off their skills, something to put in the resume.

It's not going to get any easier in next next few years, I think. Till the point when fresh grad using AI can make something valuable. After that it will be period when anybody can just ask AI to do something and it will find soft in its library or write from scratch. In long terms, 10 years may be, humanity probably will not need this many developers. There will be split like in games industry: tools/libs developers and product devs/artists/designers. With the majority in second category.

We have seen this in other industries and professions.

As everything is so new and different at this stage we are in a state of discovery which requires more senior skills to work out the lay of the land.

As we progress, create new procedures, processes, and practices, particularly guardrails then hiring new juniors will become the focus.

> The senior jobs will disappear too

Golden age of software development will be over soon? Probably, for humans. How cool is it, the most enthusiastic part will be replaced first.

Why in a few years? What training data is missing that we can’t have senior level agents today?

You can't say AI is creating something new but that it isn't being creative with clearly explaining why you think that's the case. AI is creating novel solution to problems humans haven't cracked in centuries. I don't see anything more creative than this.

> AI creates novel algorithms beating thousands of googlers.

Random HNer on an AI post one day later

> Its currently slightly more configurable clipart.

It's so ridiculous at this point that I can just laugh about this.

I've worked for a company which turned from startup to this. Product owners had no clue what they own. And no brain capacity to suggest something useful. They were just taken from the street at best, most likely had relatives' helping hands. In a couple of years company probably tripled manages headcount. It didn't help.

Depending on corporations to have a moral foundation is a losing bet. It has to come from the outside.

Here’s a possible out: Senior engineers stop working huge corporations and use these tools to start their own businesses. (Given today’s hiring situation, this may not even be a choice.) As the business grows, hire junior developers as apprentices to handle day to day tasks while senior engineer works on bigger picture stuff. Junior engineer grows into a senior engineer who eventually uses AI to start their own business. This is a very abbreviated version of what I hope I can do, at least.

> If you aren't hiring junior engineers to do these kinds of things, where do you think the senior engineers you need in the future will come from?

I know this isn't what you want to hear, but what makes you think senior engineers will be in short supply in "the future"?

I'm not even a developer (anymore, I was in the past), I'm a product manager, and I'm pretty sure I can see the point in a few years where not just developers but people like me get disintermediated. My customers have a semi-reasonable grasp of what they're looking for, and they can speak. In a few years -- ten at the absolute most -- my customers will say to an AI, "I need an application that does XYZ" and the AI will reply, "Are you sure about that? Most people who say they need XYZ end up using an app that does WXY." My (former) users will reply, "Let's try it my way and see what happens." And the AI will say, "Okay, here are three popular UI styles, which do you prefer?" etc. etc.

We're headed for Interesting Times.

The junior engineers on my team are just supercharged and their job is different from when I was a junior engineer.

I would say: ten years ago there was a huge shortage of engineers. Today, there is still lots of coding to be done, but everyone is writing code much faster and driven people learn to code to solve their own problems

Part of the reason it was so easy to get hired as a junior ten years ago was because there was so much to do. There will still be demand for engineers for a little while and then it's possible we will all be creating fairly bespoke apps and I'm not sure old me would call what future me does "programming".

Being quite blunt, just a cs degree from a good school has not been enough for quite some time. Research experience, OSS contribs, some specialty (ML, compilers, ...) are a must. I don't find this to be a problem, since it dilutes the value of an ivy league education.

On top of that, you need to be really sharp at leetcode for any large-ish company.

I find the "ai tools are junior engineers" narrative flawed, but it has any way accelerated the higher and higher expectations for a junior.

A 70% reduction in the labor force of product and engineering has a lot of consequences.

Your kid with a set of AI’s is going to blow the greybeards out of the water in a few years. They learn and iterate a lot faster. They just accept the latest tech as a given.

- greybeard who is trying his hardest to keep up

So depending on people to do harder work for less pay--that is the winning bet?

Your solution cannot work at scale, because if the small companies you propose succeed, then they will become corporations, which, as you say, cannot be depended upon to do the right thing.

It's worth keeping in mind that we're probably in a recession at the moment, due to US Executive policies which the tech industry largely disagrees with, and over which it has little influence.

> and they normally need to be already good at school math. All they lack is experience applying this education on a job - but they are professionals - educated, proactive and mostly smart.

Without being overly pessimistic, this interpretation is extremely generous.

The people who will come out the other side are domain focused people with the engineering chops to understand the system end to end, and the customer skills to understand what needs to be built.

Well, yes. But nobody is running the entire industry. You’re running a company that has competitors willing to eat your lunch.

Product owners and project managers have the soft skills to convince the company that they aren't a drain on its resources regardless of what they actually are.

Some of this relates to a culture of job-hopping. It seems uncommon these days to stick around at a company for many years.

If your next hire is only going to stay for 1-2 years, it doesn’t make sense to hire a junior team member and invest in their growth.

> Case 1.2: No AGI. Wages rise, a lot. You must remain in line with that to avoid losing those engineers you trained.

No you don't. Most engineers are shy, conflict-averse, and hate change. You can keep underpaying them and most of them will stay.

Don't shoot the messenger. He's just sharing his experience with the tool and using an anecdotal example.

How do? Perhaps if you film in Eastern Europe (which I realize does happen a bit), but even if your crew is foreign, if you’re filming in the US they’re still subject to US labor law. Being willing to ignore labor law also happens but is a bit beyond “offshoring”.

with cline you can give it a huge action plan and it will grind away until it's done. with all the context shenanigans that cursor and copilot do, it can't handle multiple tasks as well. then they are farming requests from the user so they make you click to continue all the time.

most of the coding agents now encourage you to make a rule for those times so it does remember.

it sounds like their approach is launch 5 with the same task and hopefully one works it out.

Probably already is over, I would say since the start of the first post-COVID layoffs. Like compare the current average pay in tech including inflation to what was offered like 5 years ago.

2015-2022 was peak, downhill from there and it doesn't look like it'll recover.

This may be unpopular/counter-intuitive to say, but in a capitalist world this is probably the best outcome IF (and I'm not saying I can predict the future) we expect the profession to die/be obsolete from a society POV - in such a world restricting juniors before they commit a whole career to that profession and invest too much resources into it is actually the outcome we probably want. Better than the alternative of even more mass unemployment later. If that's the case then giving people that info early, and avoiding more hiring/training now stops potential mal-investment of money and people's time into training/hiring/building careers in/etc.

It stops juniors investing their life/time/energy in a field that is shrinking and that will increasingly "not be worth it" w.r.t effort put in given their longer time horizon. This is how capitalism when working correctly can obsolete jobs somewhat charitably - it does it by closing the door on entry level jobs ideally when people have little to lose and haven't yet invested a lot of their life into it. For example they may still be young enough to re-train; or may be dismayed from entering the field due to disruption/chatter and so do something more appropriate in the new world.

Being hired in a sinking and increasingly more competitive field may actually be considered a "winner's curse" outcome, in that you will be in a industry highly competitive that is slowly sinking and is stressful with low opportunities for pay rises compared to other industries/skill sets - this is definitely playing your career in "hard mode". Most of all you will feel your skills, and value is useless relatively to people who got into more jobs with more scarcity playing life in "easy mode" with less stress and anxiety. In a few years time people getting into other fields may feel they "dodged a bullet" comparing themselves to others that did.

Being able to pivot while you are still young and ageism isn't a barrier yet is definitely something to consider remembering careers these days are multi-decades long. I feel for your kid now, and I do for mine, but I would rather than try something different in their 20's vs say their 40's when they have a mortgage, a family to feed, and/or other commitments and ageism makes it harder to pivot/re-train into another career. I don't wish my kids to feel the anxiety I and many people I know are feeling later in life especially for a career that requires constant effort to maintain and keep relevant in. I'm not recommending my kids learn what I do at all for example.

The film production company flies the cast of actors out to Serbia or whatever and relies on Serbian crews.

Prior to 2022 they'd fly out the entire crew from the US and all the workers would be American and Canadian. Union, highly paid. Now they're using local (non-American) labor.

Amazon and Apple taught the foreign talent how to do grip work so they didn't have to hire expensive American workers anymore.

There are far fewer productions happening domestically within the US now. The numbers are 30% of what they once were.

If you have 10PMs and 90 devs today, and go to 8 "hybrid" PMs + 2 specialized PMs, you're probably still creating backlog items faster than that team can close them.

So you end up with some choices:

* do you move at the same speed, with fewer people?

* do you try to move faster, with less of a reduction in people? this could be trickier than it sounds because if the frequency of changes increases the frequency of unintended consequences likely does too, so your team will have to spend time reacting to that

I think the companies that win will be the second batch. It's what happens today, basically, but today you have to convince VCs or the public market to give you a bunch of more money to hire to 10x the team size. Getting a (one-off?) chance to do that through tooling improvements is a big gift, wasting it on reducing costs instead of increasing growth could be risky.

Case 1.3: No AGI, tools increase productivity a lot, you have a bigger team and you make them more productive. In the meantime, while everyone else was scared of hiring, you got a bunch of stuff done to gain a lead in the market.

You get high EV because everyone else in your market voluntarily slowing down is a gift-wrapped miracle for you.

(Even in an AGI-soon case - you spent a bit more (let's be serious here, we're not talking about spending our entire bankroll on 18months of new hires here) in short term to get ahead, then you shift people around or lay them off. Your competitors invested that money into R&D? What does that even mean if it didn't involve hiring and AGI happens soon anyway?)

----

(Case 3: AGI soon, you don't need yourself anymore - it's hard to imagine a sufficiently advanced "AGI" that someone only replaces software devs but leaves the structure, management, and MBA-trappings of modern exchange and businesses alone.)

Yes. everyone will eventually have the job title of "problem solver"

Agreed. One of my mentors early on was a self taught engineer and honestly I'd trust him a lot more than some of the engineers with degrees

By the rate at which these things advance I would say the "Seniors" will come from there too. We are transforming into architects or going at higher levels at least. Teach your kids to be better architects instead, code is dying. My 2c at least

> The best junior I've hired was a big contributor to an open source library we were starting to use.

From my experience no one cares. You're lucky if recruiter even looks at your CV, not to mention your GitHub profile.

> With so many graduates looking for a job why don't they bang together and do something. If not for money then just to show off their skills, something to put in the resume.

Young people are already doing that, but a lot of what they produce is what you expect from people who have no prior experience in designing and testing software for production environments.

> Does this mean people will be less incentivized to contribute to open source as time goes by?

Yes. I certainly don't intend to put any free code online until I can legally bar AI bros from using it without payment. As Mike Monteiro put it long ago, "F** you, pay me" (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jVkLVRt6c1U)

also they need to pay rent

Don't forget the very important role of managing the problem solvers--if you just let the problem solvers run amuck all sorts of problems might be solved.

This is happening increasingly in pharma companies as well.

Yeah, but can they out-perform LLMs at soft skills? LLMs are really good sucking up, and telling people what they want to hear.

I don't think it's been dead for 10 years. I teach at a university and the majority of my fresh out of college students were getting good-to-great entry level offers just a few years ago. The top 5-10% were getting well into six figure offers from FAANG or similar companies. The entry level job market really tanked starting in mid to late 2022.