It’s the Perfect Time to be a Senior Developer
There has been so much noise over the past year talking about AI, AI Agents, AI taking over Software Jobs, AI destroying the world, AGI, etc etc. Personally I have experienced a mild rollercoaster of emotions and every time Fireship drops a video these days my anxiety levels rise a notch or two.
However, over the last couple of months it has been dawning on me that if you are a experienced, seasoned or senior developer (whatever you want to call yourself) you are in a beautiful position to utilise this amazing new tool that has forced itself into our everyday lives. I want to make the case that AI is not a threat to our jobs but a big boost. However, (and it’s a big HOWEVER) it all depends on how you use it.
Senior Developers Have The High Level View
I was watching this Youtube video from the talented TJ DeVries and he talks about using AI to learn. Himself and (The) Primeagen were building an app with Laravel, which they both didn’t know, and found the LLM predictor to be very useful. It was providing patterns for them in a language they weren’t familiar with and they took it as a sign they were on the right path.
This is the massive advantage that experience Developers have right now. They know enough theory, patterns and programming fundamentals that they can quickly determine if the output from the LLM of choice is a Hit or Miss. They also know the right questions to ask or right prompts to give which I have found to be very important and not spoken about much.
Example From Me Using Laravel
I am a Frontend Developer by day and spend the majority of my time in React and Typescript. However, I have been trying out Laravel recently as it was getting so much love (plus I have been a big fan of Taylor Otwell’s approach for many a year) and have been using it to build some API endpoints in my spare time.
I know how API endpoints work, I know about CRUD, I have worked on this kind of thing before with NestJS and their dependency injection approach and I am pretty familiar with databases and database migrations.
This meant going into this I knew what I roughly wanted to do, I just didn’t know the ‘Laravel’ approach and this is where I found LLMs (Claude 3.5 sonnet in Cursor to be precise) super helpful.
I knew I wanted some kind of Controller so asked Cursor for some examples of how to implement a Controller in Laravel. I knew I wanted to catch errors and return different errors depending on what the error was but again, I wasn’t familiar with Laravel best approaches for implementation. Through this I discovered about Traits. Cursor didn’t immediately give the suggestion about Traits but I asked for a better way to implement what it originally suggested and also for something I could use across API controllers and Web controllers.
This is where my experience came in. I knew about the DRY principles in coding and I knew the logic I was implementing would be needed in two places and the potential bugs and pain this could cause in the future when I would inevitably come to refactor it. Because you ALWAYS need to refactor in any meaningful project and you learn that from experience! I knew the right questions to ask.
Experience matters
Knowing the right questions to ask is a subtle but very important factor when working with LLMs. If you don’t have some idea of the domain you are in LLMs can very easier walk you down a precarious and dangerous path. And they do this very quickly so you have to be extremely careful.
For example, if I was to ask an LLM to help me create a legal contract for hiring a new employee. I know that the LLM would provide some output that on the surface would seem very credible. However, if I showed that contract to a lawyer I am certain they would find flaws in the contract that could potentially leave myself or the new employee legally exposed in the future.
However, if the lawyer asked the LLM to create a legal contract, they would know what to specifically ask for, what to be on the lookout for in terms of anomalies and ultimately create a much more solid contract. They could do this based on their experience.
The Devil is in the Details
I was watching this video from Melkey recently where he gives an overview of someone who initially claimed they had built a real world Saas application and it was making real $$$. They also claimed they had no experience as a developer. It all seemed pretty wild if it was true.
However, a few days later the same person was in a state of panic and frustration as their project started to crash down around them.
The details they reveal are pretty scary. They had left api keys exposed, hadn’t worried about CORS, had some “strange things” in their database implying not much if any security applied. All basic things if you have some experience as a developer but if not then you just wouldn’t know about these things.
And This is the thing. Yes, AI is certainly impressive in the aspect of what it can produce through nothing more than aural requests. But to think anyone can just take that tool and with little effort, replicate what would take a trained professional months to build is just straight up naive.
There are so many details in Software development that you can’t possibly learn about them quickly. You learn about them slowly, over time and usually painfully because pain is the best teacher.
Conclusion
If you have experience as a Software Developer right now, then you should really be enjoying this wonderful new suite of tools we have at our disposal. It’s certainly not all gravy but it’s pretty impressive the things that can be done at the moment. It’s like having a code scribe at your beck and call allowing you to think more and implement faster which in turn allows more trial and error and trying out more ideas.
If you’re not experienced and you’re looking to get into Software Development then I can imagine it would look pretty daunting right now as AI “can do so much”. But I am of the strong belief that if you really love building and creating things along with problem solving you will always find a place in this world.
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I’m a passionate Frontend Developer specialising in React and TypeScript. My professional journey revolves around exploring and mastering new tools and libraries within the JavaScript ecosystem.
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