The Junior Dev Crisis: Who Inherits the Code When AI Does the Work?

SUMMARY: Have we reached a point where coding is a solved problem? And if so, what are the downstream effects on companies that need software to differentiate their business?
GUEST: Brandon Whichard (linkedin.com/in/brandonwhichard), Co-Host of Software Defined Talk (softwaredefinedtalk.com)
SHOW: 1019
SHOW TRANSCRIPT: The Reasoning Show #1019 Transcript (docs.google.com/document/d/1xOnuUkxgB8gaCCrfd_…)
SHOW VIDEO: youtu.be/q0mksIKcBzk
SHOW SPONSORS:
• ShareGate - ShareGate Protect. Microsoft 365 Governance, we got this! (sharegate.com/protect)
• Nasuni - Activate your data for AI and request a demo (nasuni.com/AI)
SHOW NOTES:
• The New Kingmakers (amazon.com/New-Kingmakers-Developers-Conquered…) (Stephen O’Grady - 2014)
• Developer Growth Rates (linkedin.com/posts/gergelyorosz_how-has-the-nu…)
[Via ChatGPT] A useful way to think about it:
• Typing code → mostly commoditized
• Designing systems → partially assisted
• Owning outcomes → still very human
Topic 1 - How many years into Public Cloud did we assume that Cloud had solved the IT problem?
Topic 2 - Developers - what are we solving for?
• 10% of time coding, mostly on the last 10-15%
• Lots of time in planning meetings (decoding requirements, resource planning, updates, etc.)
• Decent amount of time fixing, troubleshooting, technical debt reduction
Topic 2a - Business people have unlimited ideas, and most ideas are money + tech
• What would be their interface to problem solving without developers? (is this just a shift to consultants)
• Is this a massive opportunity for a great PaaS 3.0 company (e.g. is Vercel an example?)
Topic 3 - [Hypothetical] Let’s assume a fairly normal company fired all their software developers tomorrow. How long before they could get a moderately complex new application of integration into production?
Topic 4 - Nobody likes to work on legacy code - missing source, missing engineers, etc. What do we call any code written by AI that was abandoned within the last 6-12 months?
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