We hire junior devs as an investment, because at some point they turn into seniors. If they stayed juniors forever, I wouldn't hire them.

I started incorporating LLMs into my workflows around the time gpt-3 came out. By comparison to its performance at that point, it sure feels like my junior is starting to become a senior.

Are you implying this technology will remain static in its capabilities going forward despite it having seen significant improvement over the last few years?

No, I'm explicitly saying that gpt-4o-2024-11-20 won't get any smarter, no matter how much I use it.

Does that matter when you can just swap it for gpt-5-whatever at some point in the future?

Someone asked why I hire juniors. I said I hire juniors because they get better. I don't need to use the model for it to get better, I can just wait until it's good and use it then. That's the argument.

I suppose the counterargument would be your investment in OpenAI allows them to fund the better model down the road, but I get your drift :)

Genuinely curious, are you saying that your junior devs don't provide any value from the work they do?

They provide some value, but between the time they take in coaching, reviewing their work, support, etc, I'm fairly sure one senior developer has a much higher work per dollar ratio than the junior.