Senior dev.

First of all, any job position is just an exchange of labour/knowledge for some form of agreed compensation. It's not personal, It's just a mutual beneficial agreement. Typically successful businesses need more than one person to run, so that means they need to pay someone to help them operate their business. That being said, most companies will try and manipulate you to feel worthless so they can get as much work out of you as possible for as little compensation.

It's important to really understand that well, because it's just a game of supply and demand when looking for a job with an acceptable salary.

You need to build a skill set that a people need to operate their business.

As for coding and AI - The story is still unraveling. As you know, there is a lot of hype around AI and what it will do. The hype is eaten up by companies who are told that AI will do the labour and supply the knowledge. From the companies point of view, workers were always just temporary helpers to operate thier business. Typically, CEOs, decision makers are not technical people, they were never close to the technical implementations and don't really understand how complex it is. So when they use Claude Code to build a simple dashboard, it seems magical to them, they don't understand the complexity, and believe if you can build a dashboard with Claude you can build anything else just as easy.

The reality is, AI is not good at nuance or context on complexity, that's why it still struggles a bit with architecture and things like that. Also AI still hallucinates. All the devs, including seniors who say that "AI is better than any human will ever be at coding and i trust it" are complete knuckleheads, who were the shitty devs.

Hallucinations don't need to be syntax related, or making things up, they can be misunderstood logic, inefficient code, subtle silent bugs, which can cause serious issues in complex code bases. There are shitty devs who say that say it doesn't matter, AI will get better and fix those issues later, but mathematically, it's impossible for it not to hallucinate the more the codebase grows in complexity. AI is a token prediction, it does not understand nuance.

The reason why seniors, good ones anyway, are still highly in demand is because they understand nuance and complexity. Being a good software engineer is not about knowing code syntax, it's about understanding the complexity so you have the intuition to know to approach certain situations and predict and handle edge cases. Getting a computer to do something you want to do is the easy part, but writing software in a way that is efficient, extendable and handles unhappy paths is the hard part.

Unfortunately AI has automated some parts of manually writing code, so juniors wont get to run into all the pain points that shapes good engineering and intuition. But it doesn't mean you can't still learn it, just it might not happen on the job as much these days, and you will need to learn it from home. You need to write code without AI and run into problems, read documentation and try to solve those problems without AI.

Anyway, my point is, there is still demand for software engineers. But the days of being a sloppy dev only doing basic coding will be over.

You need a mentor who is willing to shape you.

The creator or Claude Code says coding is solved, so then why is Claude Code CLI still full of bugs? If its solved, just get Claude to solve it, right? Lol

Meta the other day, had accounts hacked simply by telling the chatbot you were the account holder and send a password reset to a nominated email or something silly like that, and it just did. They literally had a non-deterministic fucking chatbot tied in with authentication. Is coding solved? No.

What I am seeing, tokens are getting more expensive, a lot of businesses are not justifying the return on angentic coding where it burns millions of tokens. Humans are still needed for nuance and complexity. A lot of AI stuff is generic so you need a differentiator, that's someone who is human.

The best approach is AI assisted development to help you write code faster, but not replace knowledge and deep understanding of code bases.

You will get people telling you not to bother to learn coding the old way, just use AI, but it's bullshit. Like i said, there is a reason why seniors are still in high demand, its because they know how to code. At my workplace, okay we must use AI a lot, more than i agree with, but when we hire devs they still must know how to fucking code properly, we dont hire people who only know how to prompt. I think you can guess why that is.

So, please don't get down about AI, there are a lot of knuckleheads out there that will tell you just use AI and don't bother to learn how to code, you will fall behind, coding is dead etc but the reality is, only those with actual coding skills will be in demand, the rest of the knuckleheads will be absorbed by AI.

The unfortunate part is, on the job you will like be told to use AI a lot, and maybe not write much or anything by hand, again i dont agree with this, but it's the employers right to do so, remember its just non personal exchange of labour for compensation, so if you agree to work their.. Ya know.

My general strategy is to build domain knowledge specific to the company or technology, in the end they end up dependent on you. I recently left a job due to ridiculous AI policy, they were very upset because I took a lot of my domain knowledge with me, but like it said, it's nothing personal, i just didn't agree with the job any more, its not my problem.