This is *brutal*...

"There are no more juniors. There was a funeral for their passing in 2024. Nobody came. The machine does what they do now, but cheaper. Of course, juniors weren't valuable for what they produced, they were valuable for who they would become: the senior engineer who knows where the bodies are buried. We optimized for output, and abolished apprenticeship. A few years from now, we'll wonder where all the seniors are. We shot them. Nobody will remember."

https://www.stvn.sh/writing/programming-still-sucks-fqffhyp

ETA:
This is by @stevendotjs, who absolutely nails a bunch of things I've been feeling for a while now, but had no idea how to articulate...

Reminder: de-skilling as a trend in software engineering was already in progress well before LLMs.

Toxic productivity culture, people meeting badly-designed internal reward metrics, hopping jobs and never seeing the consequences of bad choices, plummeting quality, short-termism.

Sure LLMs add fuel to this fire, but I’m not at all convinced they’re causal.

If anything, their popularity seems more a consequence of the culture than cause.

The West Forgot How to Make Things. Now It's Forgetting How to Code

Link: https://techtrenches.dev/p/the-west-forgot-how-to-make-things
Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47907879

“ignore the code: Please, Support Books”

https://ignorethecode.net/blog/2025/11/22/please_support_books/

> LLMs have had a significant impact on book sales, particularly technical books. These systems are killing the companies that created much of the content that made LLMs useful in the first place.