With the Llama 3.1 release, here’s an unpopular opinion focused on Coding Agents / Junior AI Engineers
In 6 months:
There will be plenty of Devin/Open Devin providers for simple junior level dev tasks (rather obvious) and they will be commodified.
But the real gold will be in:
Developing a system that can replace senior software engineers / architects.
Why?
- we have models that are getting better and better at coding small scope software/functions replacing the majority of junior/mediocre engineers
- what will be in more demand that has a limited supply already is Senior/Staff level people. Junior devs will need years to get that experience and LLM prompting will not make them senior.
So we will have a lot of non-human and human (to be extinct) junior engineers, but no one with enough high level technical expertise to manage them.
And I believe developing Junior engineers is not the way to get to Senior level engineers (it doesn’t need to evolve like humans, first Junior and after 500,000 commits, they will be Senior) to manage other Junior devs
By managing I mean:
- know what tech stack to use for the given task
- how to do plan big refactors for the codebase
- how to plan which bugs to fix first
- when to move to a new provider from a subsystem/library and how to assess new libraries/providers
- and many other IC (individual contributor) type of tasks for super senior engineers.
All these Devins and LLM Engineers will be commodity. Build a single Senior Software Engineer that can be the CTO of a startup (without having to manage the engineers, just technical side) and you are the next NVIDIA (imo)
Though the biggest challenges in this way, as far as I see rn are:
- There is little data on what tech stack combination is great for which use cases and what are the pitfalls,… of a library for a given task (and if there’s such a data it’s outdated. Postgres 6 might not be good for something but v8 is good or a newer version that just released and from documentation a senior engineer will know why it is a fit/unfit for the task)
- This an AGI level task. We need to make systems to decide what to do on unseen scenarios and utilize an army of junior engineers. The amount of context needed is huge and there is almost only one training case, the company itself, and AI needs to come up with how to make it a success.
Then question is, can we have AI CTOs before AGI?
Maybe, maybe not
