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AI was supposed to help juniors shine. Why does it mostly make seniors stronger?

elma.dev

21–30 of 481 posts

Re: AI was supposed to help juniors shine. Why does it mostly make seniors stronger?

#22
AI is filling "narrow" gaps. In the case of seniors these are:

-techs they understand but still not master. AI aids with implementation details only experts knowb about

- No time for long coding tasks. It aids with fast implementations and automatic tests.

- No time for learning techs that adress well understood problems. Ai helps with quick intros, fast demos and solver of learners' misunderstandings

In essence, in seniors it impacts productivity

In the case of juniors AI fills the gaps too. But these are different from seniors' and AI does not excell in them because gaps are wider and broader

- Understand the problems of the business domain. AI helps but not that much.

- Understand how the organization works. AI is not very helpful here.

- Learn the techs to be used. AI helps but it doesn't know how to guide a junior in a specific organisational context and specific business domain.

In essence it helps, but not that much because the gaps are wider and more difficult to fill

Re: AI was supposed to help juniors shine. Why does it mostly make seniors stronger?

#23
post #16

> The early narrative was that companies would need fewer seniors, and juniors together with AI could produce quality code I have never heard that before

I heard that it was supposed to replace developers (no "senior" or "junior" qualifier), by letting non-technical people make things.

Re: AI was supposed to help juniors shine. Why does it mostly make seniors stronger?

#24
Some of the juniors I work with frequently point to AI output as a source without any verification. One crazy example was using it to do simple arithmetic, which they then took as correct (and it was wrong).

This is all a pretty well-trodden debate at this point though. AI works as a Copilot which you monitor and verify and task with specific things, it does not work as a pilot. It's not about junior or senior, it's about whether you want to use this thing to do your homework/write your essay/write your code for you or whether you use it as an assistant/tutor, and whether you are able to verify its output or not.

Re: AI was supposed to help juniors shine. Why does it mostly make seniors stronger?

#26
If you search back HN history to the beginnings of AI coding in 2021 you will find people observing that AI is bad for juniors because they can't distinguish between good and bad completions. There is no surprise, it's always been this way.

Edit interesting thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27678424

Edit: an example of the kind of comment I was talking about: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27677690

Re: AI was supposed to help juniors shine. Why does it mostly make seniors stronger?

#27
Uh because an LLM is a transfer function. Specifically a transfer function where the input has to be carefully crafted. And specifically where the output has to be carefully reviewed. Inexperienced people are good at neither of those things.

Re: AI was supposed to help juniors shine. Why does it mostly make seniors stronger?

#28
No one thought juniors would be more benefited than seniors. St some people some said everything would be automatic and seniors would disappear altogether with programming itself.

But that was just said by crappy influencers whose opinion doesn’t matter as they are impressed by examples result of overfitting

Re: AI was supposed to help juniors shine. Why does it mostly make seniors stronger?

#30
post #16

> The early narrative was that companies would need fewer seniors, and juniors together with AI could produce quality code I have never heard that before

I heard that it was supposed to replace developers (no "senior" or "junior" qualifier), by letting non-technical people make things.

Ah yes, data citizens and no-code. I wonder what kind of insanity we’ll see in the future.
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