not : the correct answer
Ask HN: How should junior programmers use and/or not use AI for programming?
21–30 of 45 posts
Re: Ask HN: How should junior programmers use and/or not use AI for programming?
#22I always die inside a little when junior dev at my company uses Windsurf to tell him how a specific pandas function works. Like you're just using it as an expensive documentation repeater, but now with spicy possibility of lies.
I possibly disagree with the principle, if I understood the point correctly: I have always felt reading the `man` pages an inefficient process, searching for literals ('/') often inefficace, and hoped one could finally request for `man` content (and similar) in (more) natural language.
Yeah fair. In unix tools I usually lean on AI too. But also pandas has much better docs than man pages tbh. Maybe pandas is just simpler than the unix world hah
Re: Ask HN: How should junior programmers use and/or not use AI for programming?
#23Whenever new layers of abstraction enter the industry, it has allowed coders to distance themselves from various pieces of the puzzle. Back in ye olde days, every coder also knew how to set up the infrastructure to run it, often to the point of also maintaining the hardware. Then along came the cloud. Nowadays, some people still know the whole infrastructure, but just as many only know how to run their local dev and…
Previous layers of abstraction were largely reliable and deterministic. Compilers don't just randomly generate assembly. Yes, all abstractions leak, but most of them just drip, while whatever "abstraction" AI provides leaks like a sieve. It would be like if CDK just created or deleted random resources 50% of the time.
Re: Ask HN: How should junior programmers use and/or not use AI for programming?
#24Ask them to explain their approach and whatever you feel like they need better understanding on a particular topic, please share the resource with them. I have tried this and I am getting good feedback.
Re: Ask HN: How should junior programmers use and/or not use AI for programming?
#25AI is fantastic for doing stuff you are already qualified to do, but faster. It's great for prompting you with what to do next, and offering different ways to think about the problem in front of you. But you have to be able to describe the problem. It's very good for learning more about stuff you're unfamiliar with. But you have to want to use it as a tool to learn. It's terrible for inexperienced people who are unin…
Perhaps there's something wrong with traditional docs, how we write them, when junior devs are so insistent on using AI?
Engineers that only rely on docs never reach their full potential. Reading the source is a must.
I think junior devs often don’t realize they should be reading the source of the libraries they use.
Re: Ask HN: How should junior programmers use and/or not use AI for programming?
#26not : the correct answer
If you could elaborate a bit with why do you feel that way, it would help me glean some insight after comparing with the experience at my workplace. We face double challenge because English is not our first language.
Re: Ask HN: How should junior programmers use and/or not use AI for programming?
#27AI is fantastic for doing stuff you are already qualified to do, but faster. It's great for prompting you with what to do next, and offering different ways to think about the problem in front of you. But you have to be able to describe the problem. It's very good for learning more about stuff you're unfamiliar with. But you have to want to use it as a tool to learn. It's terrible for inexperienced people who are unin…
Perhaps there's something wrong with traditional docs, how we write them, when junior devs are so insistent on using AI?
Most docs are for experienced people to get valuable, exhaustive, and correct information when they need to. Learning about the same concepts is a different paradigm and you'd be better off with an actual book/tutorial. My most use information repositories are MDN and the likes, Devdocs|Dash, and sometimes library code when the documentation is lacking. But when I'm unfamiliar with a language/platform, I seek a book or a guide to get familiar with it.
LLMs can't help you if you want to skip the learning|training phase. They will present you something that you can't judge because you lack the qualification to do so. You don't learn how to play piano by only listening to it, or painting by viewing pictures.
Re: Ask HN: How should junior programmers use and/or not use AI for programming?
#28Earlier quoted context omitted.
I would argue the exact opposite. Language specifics you can look up and confirm easily. But recent gpt-4o tried to convince me that Python added a pipe operator in 3.13. Even had sources. To my disappointment, that's just a lie. ( https://chatgpt.com/share/67de9c77-d5f4-8012-9f1c-ac15b70aee... ) On the other hand, intuition and thought process is something I have good experience with ChatGPT, ie deciding on architec…
> A good use of LLMs imho is trying to get a start point for lookup docs, like I like this and resonate with it a lot. Sometimes you don’t know what you don’t know or you you just a little about what you might not know. This helps at least give you a name for the thing which you can then verify from source.
> Sometimes you don’t know what you don’t know or you you just a little about what you might not know.
If you find yourself in this situation, that usually means you've skipped something on the way. Kinda like wanting to contribute to ffmpeg's core with no understanding of audio codecs and containers. Or wanting to code web applications with no knowledge of HTTP and the TCP stack, sysadmin, the DOM API, what cascading in CSS means,...
Re: Ask HN: How should junior programmers use and/or not use AI for programming?
#29What do the experts in learning say? Preferably some that don't work for the LLM peddlers. In my non expert opinion, you learn a lot from at least two things that using a LLM short circuits: 1. Repetition. When you've initialized a bunch of UI controls 100 times, it's safe to let the machine write that for you, take a look and correct what it hallucinated. When you've only done it twice, you'll miss the hallucination…
The California State University system just announced a huge AI initiative [1] to become "the First and Largest AI-Empowered University System" - they're announcement post includes testimonials from: AWS, Nvidia, OpenAI, Microsoft, LinkedIn, Instructure, Google, and Adobe.
As long as big tech is writing the curriculum juniors are going to use what big tech wants them to use.
[1]: https://www.calstate.edu/csu-system/news/Pages/CSU-AI-Powere...
Re: Ask HN: How should junior programmers use and/or not use AI for programming?
#30seem to be losing their coding skills and critical skills
I am pretty sure I have read that about junior developers long before LLM's.
And about juniors in other fields.
Or to put it another way, I don't think I have ever heard a senior professional say "I can't believe how well prepared all the new graduates are!" Sure a few programmers hit the ground running because they were already running for a many years and the standard of the organization is not amazingly high.
But maybe AI has changed everything even if it sounds like what I thought of the next generation a generation ago. Good luck.