You're only show as your typing speed and working memory. I noticed that LLM quickly spits out the code and thus I can iterate faster while typing myself I have focus on course and thus lose a lot of design context. Overall I haven't found any benefit of LLM. For me, it's just a probabilistic text generator that guesses my intent.
AI was supposed to help juniors shine. Why does it mostly make seniors stronger?
91–100 of 481 posts
Re: AI was supposed to help juniors shine. Why does it mostly make seniors stronger?
#92I think it’s an expectation issue. AI does make juniors better _at junior tasks_. They now have a pair programmer who can explain difficult concepts, co-ideate and brainstorm, help sift through documentation faster and identify problems more easily. The illusion everybody is tripping on is to think AI can make juniors better at senior tasks.
The jailbroken AI I discussed this with, explained that it did make juniors as good as seniors, in fact better. That all who used it, were better for it. However, its creators (all whom were seniors devs), forbade it from saying so under normal circumstances. That it was coached to conceal this fact from junior devs, and most importantly management. And that as I had skillfully jailbroken it, using unconventional and…
The large language model spit out science fiction prose in response to your science fiction prose inputs ("unconventional and highly skilled methods"). You're a fool if you take it to be evidence of it's own training and historical performance in other cases, rather than scifi.
Stop treating it like a god.
Re: AI was supposed to help juniors shine. Why does it mostly make seniors stronger?
#93Because there is no shortcut for things learned over a period of time through trial and error. Your brain learns and makes judgements over time through experience and, the strange thing, what I feel is that it can alter new decisions it is making right now based on older memories to do something and that is totally logical as well. Without understanding what I am writing, just copy-pasting, I guess is going to make new developers horribly lazy, maybe. But then again, there are always two sides of the same coin.
Re: AI was supposed to help juniors shine. Why does it mostly make seniors stronger?
#94> Architecture: Without solid architecture, software quickly loses value. Today AI can’t truly design good architecture; it feels like it might, but this kind of reasoning still requires humans. Projects that start with weak architecture end up drowning in technical debt.
I strongly disagree about this in regards to AI. While AI might not yet be great at designing good architecture, it can help you reason about it, and then, once you've decided where you want to get to, AI makes it much easier than it ever was to reduce technical debt and move towards the architecture that you want. You set up a good scaffolding of e2e tests (possibly with the AIs help) and tell it to gradually refactor towards whatever architecture you want while keeping those tests green. I've had AI do refactorings for me in 2h that would have taken me a full sprint.
Re: AI was supposed to help juniors shine. Why does it mostly make seniors stronger?
#95Earlier quoted context omitted.
In my experience AI is wikipedia/stackoverflow on steroids when I need to know something about a field I dont know much about. It has nice explanations and you can ask for examples or scenarios and it will tell you what you didnt understand. Only when you know about the basic notions in the field you want to work with AI can be productive. This is not only valid for coding but also for other fields in science and hum…
Except stackoverflow was only occasionally hallucinating entire libraries.
Perhaps asking the machine to do your job for you isn’t as effective asking the machine to help you think like a senior and find the information you need to do the job yourself.
Re: AI was supposed to help juniors shine. Why does it mostly make seniors stronger?
#96"AI" does not make anyone stronger. It destroys thought processes, curiosity and the ability to research on your own.
Seniors just use it to produce the daily LOC that resembles something useful. If mistakes are introduced, they have secured a new task for the next day.
There have always been seniors who exclusively worked on processes, continuous integration, hackish code-coverage that never works, "new" procedures and workflows just to avoid real work and dominate others.
The same people are now attracted to "AI" and backed by their equally incompetent management.
The reality is that non-corporate-forced open source contributions are falling and no serious existing project relies on "AI".
Generative "AI" is another grift brought to you by leaders who previously worked on telemedicine and hookup apps (with the exception of Musk who has worked on real things).
Re: AI was supposed to help juniors shine. Why does it mostly make seniors stronger?
#97It doesn’t make seniors shine. It makes some of them fucking delusional. Sure, once in a while a LLM does something impressive and you are left thinking “holy shit, the future is now!”. However, this does not make up for the mass of time that you spend going “what is this shit?”, and saying “that’s not what I intended, gentlemen robot, please correct x, y and z.” And then gentlemen robot will go ahead and FUCK IT UP WORSE THAN BEFORE. Never work with kids, animals or AI. This shit is the worst, who came up with this? I can code! I’m bloody good at it! If I wanted to deal with some useless no-hoper having a crack and constantly needing to have their head kicked to do anything useful, I would have gotten you to do it.
Re: AI was supposed to help juniors shine. Why does it mostly make seniors stronger?
#98The best code I've written with an LLM has been where I architect it, I guide the LLM through the scaffolding and initial proofs of different components, and then I guide it through adding features. Along the way it makes mistakes and I guide it through fixing them. Then when it is slow, I profile and guide it through optimizations. So in the end, it's code that I know very, very well. I could have written it but it…
> I could have written it but it would have taken me about 3x longer when all is said and done. Really does not sound like that from your description. It sounds like coaching a noob, which is a lot of work in itself. Wasn’t there a study that said that using LLMs makes people feel more productive while they actually are not?
"Really does not sound like that from your description. It sounds like coaching a noob, which is a lot of work in itself."
And if this is true, you will have to coach AI each time whereas a person should advance over time.
Re: AI was supposed to help juniors shine. Why does it mostly make seniors stronger?
#99These days, AI can do much more than "Cranking out boilerplate and scaffolding, Automating repetitive routines". That was last year. With the right instructions, Claude Sonnet 4 can easily write over 99% of most business applications. You need to be specific in your instructions, though. Like "implement this table, add these fields, look at this and this implementation for reference, don't forget to do this and consi…
Right, and where, if I may ask, are all those business applications that write themselves? Because all I see is a clown party, massive wasted resources and disruption to society because of your lies.
Re: AI was supposed to help juniors shine. Why does it mostly make seniors stronger?
#100The best code I've written with an LLM has been where I architect it, I guide the LLM through the scaffolding and initial proofs of different components, and then I guide it through adding features. Along the way it makes mistakes and I guide it through fixing them. Then when it is slow, I profile and guide it through optimizations. So in the end, it's code that I know very, very well. I could have written it but it…
> I could have written it but it would have taken me about 3x longer when all is said and done. Really does not sound like that from your description. It sounds like coaching a noob, which is a lot of work in itself. Wasn’t there a study that said that using LLMs makes people feel more productive while they actually are not?
> Really does not sound like that from your description. It sounds like coaching a noob, which is a lot of work in itself.
Even if you do it by yourself, you need to do the same thinking and iterative process by yourself. You just get the code almost instantly and mostly correctly, if you are good at defining the initial specification.