ms. bubbles

ok, i finally got around to thinking hard about what the biggest drawback of AI coding agents like Claude and Codex is... it’s not them making mistakes or making developers dumber. imo, it’s how they’ve turned this into an unfair fight. AI has narrowed the visible gap between a newcomer, a junior engineer and a senior engineer by a ridiculous amount, while somehow raising the level required to get in. as a newcomer, you could always jump in, work your way through code and literally outwork the other person. but now the baseline has been raised so much that your productivity also depends on how many tokens and subscriptions you can afford. like, the capability bottleneck that decides where you'd end up is still 70% of the game, with tokens being the other 30%, but in a cutthroat industry where even 1% matters, that's a lot. non-tech people can build shit insanely fast now. so just being able to build something is no longer enough to call yourself a software engineer. the bar keeps moving higher. this is suspiciously becoming pay-to-win. it feels like you're not even allowed to take your time and work through HTML, CSS and JS by hand anymore because the FOMO is so strong. while you're learning how everything works, people using better agents are already shipping. for someone passionate who likes to romanticise the little things, this is a huge drawback. maybe the weird thing is that this is in the process of becoming a layer we don't see anymore, like bits and memory allocation eventually became. getting your foot in the door is becoming harder. the path from newcomer to junior engineer is somehow harder but also much simpler now: keep grinding DSA and keep building cool shit until someone lets you in. i don't think the actual gap between a junior and senior engineer is disappearing. experience and judgement still matter way too much. but the material keeps moving down. distributed systems and system design were always labelled as things you'd study alongside your job after 4–5 years, while trying to move towards senior. now me and a lot of other college students are already working through them because the bar is getting so damn high. what's frustrating about this is that you're kinda expected to choose your domain before you've worked in it in real life. you chose backend? ok, now become competent. sure, you grinded, and now you're really competent. now you'll get a job. wdym you don't like it? too bad, you can't switch because you'll have to go through that process all over again. this is one place where i believe DSA and big tech are still sorted. you can still get into a good job using a tool that will help you build your fundamentals on the job and choose later. FAFO, which imo is the core of this field, is becoming tougher at the career level. you can build a lot more things, so you can FAFO, but what happens when you realise this isn't the playground you wanna play in? it has never been easier to build software, but getting your foot in the door somehow keeps getting harder. especially when the amount of money you can spend on AI directly affects how fast you can move. and the biggest thing: once we've fully embraced handing our execution over to AI, we pay these companies somewhat reasonable money rn, but what happens when they pull the rug? why is my future in an industry also dependent on what a billion-dollar corporation decides to price its product at tomorrow? i get that the industry is in a transition phase, but this whole thing feels weird... there are a lot of firsts in this industry that we've never seen before, and that's what's kinda worrying me. just my lil two thoughts and what I've been reading into.