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Very well said.

I also think reading and reviewing code is a skill that connected to but very much independent of the writing of code, and the use of coding agents requires us to be far more skilled and diligent at it.

So put another way, people who were good at coding without agents may in fact be a poor fit with them, which means the entire industry is experiencing a dislocation between skills we have and skills we need, leading to extremely bimodal outcomes.

by prerok1 hours ago|

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Indeed, however I would also point out that senior engineers have already been expected to be good at reading code: they were expected to evaluate the code quality of other contributors, so they had to be able to do that.

In fact, from my personal experience, going from junior to mid to senior, that was the hardest thing. Reading the code and thinking if what they did was really correct and will not have additional undesired side-effects was hard to become efficient at (it didn't help that we were working in C back then).

So, really, I think that for juniors it's actually much harder because if they want to do due dilligence they have to do the same evaluation but without the years of experience working with that code base. I can understand, even if I don't like it, that they just submit the output of the LLM for the senior to review.

by unknownfuture30 minutes ago|

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> Indeed, however I would also point out that senior engineers have already been expected to be good at reading code: they were expected to evaluate the code quality of other contributors, so they had to be able to do that.

Yeah, but the frequency, volume, and complexity of that activity, and its ratio versus all the other work that a developer was previously expected to do, has shifted dramatically, not least because now we're having to review the output of our own coding agents as well as that of other developers on our teams.

As a consequence, folks who were marginal but capable at that skill now likely find themselves working beyond their ability.

> So, really, I think that for juniors it's actually much harder because if they want to do due dilligence they have to do the same evaluation but without the years of experience working with that code base. I can understand, even if I don't like it, that they just submit the output of the LLM for the senior to review.

Yup, couldn't agree more.