Hey folks,
Someone in our community asked this question a few days ago, but deleted it before anyone saw it. Reposting it, as I think this is a relevant question.
I’m a junior developer, and with AI agents becoming so common, it feels like fewer and fewer people are actually writing code by hand. I’m still coding everything myself, but when I see experienced developers constantly talking about tokens, prompts, AI agents, and how they use AI to write code, I sometimes start to feel pretty anxious.
Does learning coding or doing challenges like CodeCrafters help me in getting a job?
In your experience, what would you tell someone who is just starting out? Where should they spend their time? If you are hiring junior developers, what skills/qualities do you look for?
I had posted this before, but I deleted it because I felt it might not quite fit the nature of this community. I feel a little embarrassed posting it again.
I’d really appreciate it if anyone feels comfortable sharing their thoughts or opinions. I’m genuinely very curious to hear what others think.
I’m using a translator, so I apologize if some of what I’m trying to say doesn’t come across clearly.
I have a hypothesis that in a couple of years, the market will be starving for junior and middle engineers, and companies, even FAANG-like, will have to lower their barriers to hire people who are eager to grow into real engineers among the vast pool of coders who will be unable to plan their work or analyze its results without AI models.
Senior eng with ten years experience here, my two cents -
Yes, definitely worth learning the basics. Practically, I don’t see a future where you will be expected to implement things on the job without AI. But every day there is an expectation that you know how your code works, and can steer an AI to implement things in a way that is not too complex, meets the requirements, and is easy to expand into future requirements.
Knowing how to read code is becoming even more important, and developing a good sense of code smell requires practice. Knowing how to communicate about code is also becoming even more important. These things take time, experience, and some painful learning. It’s worth the investment.
Besides, you never know when an interview will be “No AI allowed”.
I am definitely sure that writing and reading code is mostly useless now, that being said, using AI Agents and how to get maximum accuracy and throughput from them is worth learning. Still knowing the basics of your field like OS, Networking, databses, processes, threads, etc. is worth it to be able to prompt better.
I believe this also but i think that ai agents will be the new abstraction layer just like the compliers era, even if compliers are highly deterministic but this is the reality we are in and im not saying that coding is dead but it going to be valuable if ai agents become expensive in the eye of companies
definitely i agree 100% on that , judgment and the ability to define constraints on process flow for ai to implement is valuable skill that can only come from practicing and building manually and with try and errors
I think learning to code in one compiled language and beginner level experience with assembly language is important. Another important skill is navigating and understanding existing code bases.