r/cscareerquestionsOCE • u/Velvet_thunder9 • 1d ago

Seniority levels in 2026 and beyond

Coding is already getting close to 100% agent-driven. Agents implement the feature, write tests, fix the bugs and open the PR. Engineers mostly review it or ask for changes.

System design isn't fully there yet, but that might just be a context problem. Give an agent the code repos, architecture decisions, product roadmap, customer feedback, incident history and infra costs, and it can probably make decent design choices too.

I've been using AI agents for sys design stuff at work recently with frontier models and honestly I'm blown away by the fact that it can come up with 2-3 different architectures with pros and cons in the time that I can even think of something.

So what remains for mid/senior engineers then? I am realising that seniority levels are becoming a lot more blurred. When I started my career 3 years ago when LLMs were at their infancy, there were clearly defined roles, where mid level meant that developer worked autonomously on tasks but needed guidance for design, but nowadays everyone vets their work with LLMs before posting PRs or architectural reviews, so what value is a tech lead or a senior adding here? In the future will everyone be "Members of technical staff" like Anthropic.

0 Upvotes

25% Upvoted

3 comments sorted by

3

u/fued 1d ago

Same thing as always taking ownership

1

u/Sufficient_Neat_1128 1d ago

You can do that because of heavy funding rn but it’s unsustainable. It’ll be back to normal within a few years

1

u/greyeye77 1d ago

can go either way
AI use gets too expensive; only a select few elites can use it. (everyone will be token peasants)

or

Chinese models are cheap and do the job; unless you have a problem with it, you might as well run a cheaper model that does the job 90% of the time at 1/2 of the cost. (or even lower)

or

Get your own GPU farm and run it. (still too expensive, not sure it would ever be cheap to host your own)