Another post about AI? I just made one earlier this afternooooon…

But then Forrest Brazeal posted this, which got me thinking:

If we treat AI like a junior developer, do we interview AI the way we interview junior developers? Make AI do a whiteboard coding exercise? Insist that it can demonstrate more years of experience with your tech stack than are appropriate for a junior level? Put it through several rounds of interviews and then ghost it?

I’ve never heard of anyone doing that. Why not? Probably because hiring a human developer is a Big Deal involving great expense, and something like an AI coding assistant is a comparably smaller expense.

I wonder if there’s also a measure of “with humans, we need to consider what this person is like as a colleague,” with a corresponding assumption that we don’t need to consider that for AI because it’s not a person. Is that true?

Granted, AI will get its fingers all over your codebase in a way that no single developer can, because you’ll deploy it on every team. But that’s okay, because just like hiring an army of junior developers, you’d have senior developers providing careful oversight. Hm. Is that true now?

I wonder who’s easier to “let go,” if they aren’t working out: AI, or human. Who is evaluated more carefully. What “working out” means for a developer, anyway. Oh, we’re back to the topic of “what makes an effective/productive developer” again.

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