> because this means there’s really no business reason to ever hire a junior

aren't these people your seniors in the coming years? Its healthy to model an inflow and outflow.

The pipeline dries up when orgs would rather get the upfront savings of gen AI productivity gains versus invest in talent development.

It's a junior engineer that doesn't learn - they make the same mistakes even after being corrected the second that falls out their context window (even often with "corrections" still there...), they struggle to abstract those categories of mistakes to avoid making similar ones in the future, and (by the looks of it) will never be "the senior". "Hiring a Junior" should really be seen as an investment more than immediate output.

I keep being told that $(WHATEVER MODEL) is the greatest thing ever, but every time I actually try to use them they're of limited (but admittedly non-zero) usefulness. There's only so many breathless blogs or comments I can read that just don't mesh with the reality I personally see.

Maybe it's sector? I generally work on Systems/OS/Drivers, large code bases in languages like C, C++ and Rust. Most larger than context windows even before you look at things like API documentation. Even as a "search and summarizer" tool I've found it completely wrong in enough cases to be functionally worthless as the time required to correct and check the output isn't a saving. But they can be handy for "autocompletion+" - like "here's a similar existing block of code, now do the same but with (changes)".

They generally seem pretty good at being like a template engine on non-templated code, so thing like renaming/refactoring or similar structure recognition can be handy. Which I suspect might also explain some of those breathless blog posts - I've seen loads which say "Any non-coder can make a simple app in seconds!" - but you could already do that, there's a million "Simple App Tutorial" codebases that would match whatever license you want, copy one, change the name at the top and you're 99% of the way to the "Wow Magic End Result!" often described.

We are using probabilistic generators to output what should be deterministic solutions.

You know what else is probabilistic? You and me. That's why we have tooling in place to mitigate that and to constrain our variable outputs into more reliable, deterministic results. And luckily, a lot of that tooling can be used for probabilistic machines as well.

> DoD-like jobs where Claude Code (or other code security concerns) mean they need actual honest programmers without assistance.

Then they'll just get a contract to spin up a DoD-secure variant: https://www.anthropic.com/news/anthropic-and-the-department-...

DoD will probably be requiring use of Mechahitler soon enough.