The Death of the Junior Developer

A speculative alarm sounded six weeks into a phenomenon Steve names here for the first time: this is the essay that coins "CHOP," with a warning attached that he suspects he'll be saying it a lot. Every section is titled after a horror film (he and his wife Linh are lifelong horror buffs), and the whole thing opens by conceding the sky might not be falling before spending several thousand words on the spidey-sense that says it is. The evidence is anecdotal on purpose: a 50-person law firm whose pensions and succession planning hit an existential crisis over a chatbot, Gene Kim getting ten days of writing done in ninety minutes, a six-week intern project rebuilt in a single day. The centerpiece is Steve's own story, about a GPT-4o design proposal so persuasive and so appealingly packaged that he laughed at it "for minutes, practically unhinged." What was wrong with it, and how much experience it takes to see, carries the essay's real argument about who chat coding is safe for.

Two things read differently now. As a Sourcegraph post it moonlights as a pitch for Cody, and the mid-2024 furniture — GPT-4o as the watershed, raw ChatGPT as the world's most popular coding assistant, chatgpt-shell in Emacs — dates it to the week. That datedness has become its value: a field report from the precise moment chat iterations started converging instead of petering out after four or five rounds. Meanwhile the definition of "senior" tucked near the end runs two sentences and mentions neither age nor years of service, which goes a long way toward explaining why the argument that followed spent months fighting over whom the essay had actually condemned. The closing advice for students is concrete enough to be assignable: read the SRE book cover to cover, run important prompts past two rival models and make them critique each other, stop memorizing language arcana.