If you thought a lot about being promoted, if you wanted it hard, I have good news for you - you were promoted! You may wonder - how did it happen? Let’s say you were a junior in 2022, as I was. What would be your day-to-day work in some bloody enterprise?

• Implementing small scoped features with straightforward explanations on how to do it
• Debugging and maintaining legacy code

These 2 activities were enough for you because your days were eaten by Stack Overflow and by browsing some obscure docs for Java 8¹.

It took only 4 years for LLMs to be able to one-shot, or at least greatly steer such tasks - for example, see this practical talk on how to work on Spring Boot with agents.

So, if you can prompt a coding agent (nowadays anyone can²), you can do all these tasks with greater ease. And don’t get me wrong, I’m lovin’ it!

So we can say you’ve been promoted, since your skill level has ‘risen’. Whether this is actually the case doesn’t matter — what matters to you (and to your employer) is the result. Moreover, this is a good thing: it will help you get used to how promotions actually work — first you step into a new role, and only after some time is your status officially confirmed. The only difference with AI is that in addition to picking up new skills, you’ll also have to prevent the degradation of old ones.

As always there is only one correct answer - you should lead the revolution if you cannot fight against it. Learn those tools, but only as tools in your toolbelt. Do not buy into aggressive marketing from AI labs. Just be wary of several things:

1. From the point of view of business it does not matter how a task will be done, you should use all tools at your disposal for completing the task in the fastest manner possible. For juniors it means: any business nowadays expects from you something more than the ability to close tickets or write code with a detailed spec. Be the software engineer you always dreamed of being! You should focus on skills at a level higher than coding:
   • navigating changing requirements and clarifying them with stakeholders, and tailoring software to their needs
   • owning solutions end-to-end
   • understanding systems as a whole and using system design and software architecture. Arguably this is the last useful skill and it should be prioritized over learning new libraries or programming languages.
   • building products and growing product mindset³
2. Overreliance on coding agents can give you short bursts of productivity, but you will never improve your performance. You should be tired in a correct manner because of learning, not doomscrolling.
3. There is no guarantee that AI development will not stall, yet AI labs will gladly sell you some doom vision where every college graduate or knowledge worker generally will be obsolete. Completely ignore all BS.
4. Coding was a challenge in itself, but there are other aspects of software engineering. And these aspects will require agency and humans⁴.
5. For leading the revolution you must maintain yourself physically and mentally. My uni supervisor advised to spend as much time as you can outdoors. Your city certainly has gyms, exhibitions, concerts, open lectures not related to tech or simply beautiful scenery.

In our times, learning generally and the skill of learning and adaptation will be even more important. Maybe in the future I will write about educational apps I have an idea about. But for now, see the list of good books covering this.

But wait - what about seniors? Everybody knows that developers love challenges. They love leetcode, codeforces, etc. But everybody⁵ knows that gets boring. What better promotion than one that lets them demonstrate their senior skills? Let them feel that sweet pressure. 🙃

Here are several ways to inspire your seniors:

• Allocate enormous budget for AI usage. Tokens must flow. Burn them with great speed. Do not talk about ROI or actual gains in customer satisfaction (or raises).
• Tweak your SDLC for the greatest throughput of LOC per day, the more the better. Brag about it everywhere. Do not talk about ROI or actual gains in customer satisfaction.
• Train an AI model on screen movements and clicks of your developers, halt all of that because of a data breach on a company level.

I am sure that we will find a way to achieve even more with this. Come on folks, we really can get rid of this disgusting three nines! 🙃

And remember - wherever you will be, remember that as a human you have willpower and use it with sheer optimism, because Beethoven told you so. And he knew what he was talking about. Read his biography and listen to his music.