I work on 3rd party API integrations, of which, we have hundreds, each in its own repo. We need to build thousands more at a fraction of the cost. Any given integration historically takes a human a few days up to a few months to build and is subject to ongoing maintenance. We frequently do not have access to the API and we mostly never have a representative data set if we do. Complex APIs tend to expose multiple, entwined data models. Documentation may be wrong or in a foreign language.

I've been building a new framework to do it better. Ideally, we can get an agent to spit them out in a few minutes to hours with a much reduced ops burden for managing the fleet, all with very high confidence. The later requires pushing as much into the type system as possible and leveraging static analysis. Much of the work has been embarrassingly parallelizable. Consider categorizing access patterns across the entire set or ensuring byte for byte parity (over the input space of third party API responses).

This is absolutely not a problem that a human or 2 could tackle prior to AI.

Yes, of course.

> you're effectively killing the pipline for senior engineers. Then what?

I honestly don't know _what_. Its a prisoner's dilemma.

I always have a few agents (2-5) doing research and working on plans in parallel. A plan is a thorough and unambiguous document describing the process to implement some feature. It contains goals, non-goals, data models, access patterns, explicit semantics, migrations, phasing, requirements, acceptance criteria, phased and final. Plans often require speculative work to formulate. Plans take hours to days to a couple of weeks to write. Humans may review the plans or derived RFCs. Chiefly AI reviews the code (multiple agents with differing prompts until a fixed point is reached between them). Tests and formal methods are meant to do heavy lifting.

In my highest volume weeks, I ship low hundreds of thousands of lines of software not counting changes to deps.

> At a corporate level, I'd much rather hire a junior engineer

Any formulation of problem sufficient for a truly junior engineer to execute is better given to an agent. The solution is cheaper, faster, and likely better. If the later doesn't hold, 10 independent solutions are still cheaper and faster than a junior engineer.

There is no longer any likely path to teaching a junior engineer the trade.

Not a lawyer, but that reads as compelled speech to me. Materially misrepresenting an image would be libel, today, right?

The simplicity is nice, but for the (probable) fact that suicide attempts/rates and emigration don't correspond... so lets not call it happiness.

One remarkable counter example in my neck of the woods is the Orthodox Church, which has done extraordinarily well since covid, picking up tons of converts. Of course, people themselves are conserved, too. That growth has come at the expense of protestant churches which in my reckoning sorta stopped being churches during covid. I'd estimate 1/3 of my local congregation is non-Greek converts who seemingly have no intention of learning the language (services regularly run 1.5 to 2 hours, largely in koine Greek)!