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

elma.dev

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

#31
post #20

Certainly not just coding. Senior designers and copywriters get much better results as well. It is not surprising, if context is one of the most important aspects of a prompt, then someone with domain experience is going to be able to construct better context. Similarly, it takes experience to spot when the LLM is going in the wrong direction it making mistakes. I think for supercharging a junior, it should be used m…

The funny part is that it completely fails in the area so many people are desperate for it to succeed: replacing engineers and letting non-technical people create complex systems. Look at any actually useful case for AI, or just through this thread, and it's always the same thing; expertise is critical to getting anything useful out of these things (in terms of direct code generation anyway).

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

#33
AI produces code that often looks really good, at a pace quicker than you can read it.

It can be really, really hard to tell when what it's producing is a bag of ** and it's leading you down the garden path. I've been a dev for 20 years (which isn't to imply I'm any good at it yet) and it's not uncommon I'll find myself leaning on the AI a bit too hard and then you realise you've lost a day to a pattern that wasn't right, or an API it hallucinated, in the first place.

It basically feels like I'm being gaslit constantly, even though I've changed my tools to some that feel like they work better with AIs. I expect it's difficult for junior devs to cope with that and keep up with senior devs, who normally would have offloaded tasks to them instead of AI.

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

#35

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…

Even as an assistant it's frustrating. Even trying to get simple stuff like a quick summary of a tools flags/commands can be hilariously wrong at times.

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

#38
Verification.

That’s the whole issue in a nutshell.

Can the output of a generative system be verified as accurate by a human (or ultimately verified by a human)

Experts who can look at an output and verify if it is valid are the people who can use this.

For anyone else it’s simply an act of faith, not skill.

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

#39
The "junior + AI" idea always felt like a manager's fantasy more than an engineering reality. If you don’t already know what “good” looks like, it's really hard to guide AI output into something safe, maintainable, and scalable

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

#40
post #12

I read, ages ago, this apocryphal quote by William Gibson: “The most important skill of the 21st century is to figure out which proper keywords to type in the Google search bar, to display the proper answers.” To me, that has never been more true. Most junior dev ask GeminiPiTi to write the JavaScript code for them, whereas I ask it for explanation on the underlying model of async/await and the execution model of a J…

Feels like the real "AI literacy" isn't prompt engineering in the meme sense, but building the conceptual scaffolding so that the prompts (and the outputs) actually connect to something meaningful
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