Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

elma.dev

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

111–120 of 481 posts

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

#111

Post by chasd00 »

bentt wrote: post #60

The 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’ve found LLMs are most useful when I know what I want to do but just don’t want to type it all out. My best success so far was an LLM saving me about 1,000 lines of typing and fixing syntax mistakes on a web component plus backend in a proprietary framework.

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

#113

Post by celticninja »

bentt wrote: post #60

The 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…

A junior would see the solution works and create a PR. A senior knows it works, why it works and what can be improved, then they open a PR.

AI is great at a first draft of anything, code, images, text, but the real skill is turning that first draft into something good.

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

#114

Post by Simulacra »

In my narrow field, at least, AI has been tremendously helpful to those of us who clearly understand how to use it, and specifically how to apply it to the job. I think Junior developers are still in that phase of throwing code until something works. They try to use AI, but they either don't understand how, or they don't fully understand the output. In my humble opinion, experience knows what's possible and what will work so the outcomes are better.

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

#115

Post by conartist6 »

I like the call-out for wrong learning.

Learning is why we usually don't make the same mistake twice in a row, but it isn't wisdom. You can as easily learn something wrong as something right if you're just applying basic heuristics like "all pain is bad", which might lead one to learn that exercise is bad.

Philosophy is the theory-building phase where learning becomes wisdom, and in any time period junior engineers are still going to be developing their philosophy. It's just that now they will hear a cacophony of voices saying dross like, "Let AI do the work for you," or, "Get on the bandwagon or get left behind," when really they should be reading things like The Mythical Man-Month or The Grug-brained Developer or Programming as Theory Building, which would help them understand the nature of software development and the unbendable scaling laws that govern its creation.

Steve Yegge if you're out there, I dog dare you to sit down for a debate with me

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

#116

Post by Simulacra »

falcor84 wrote: post #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, a…

My friend works in legislative affairs for the government, and he uses the AI to reason with himself. To think through issues, and to generate new ideas. He uses it much like a private colleague, which in the world of just words, seems like a good idea.

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

#117

Post by DarkNova6 »

celticninja wrote: post #113
bentt wrote: post #60

The 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…

A junior would see the solution works and create a PR. A senior knows it works, why it works and what can be improved, then they open a PR. AI is great at a first draft of anything, code, images, text, but the real skill is turning that first draft into something good.

I don't see this a problem of seniority but one of mindset. I've met enough "senior devs" that will push just about anything and curious juniors that are much more selective about their working process.

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

#118

Post by Avicebron »

rolisz wrote: post #103
giantg2 wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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.

And then they skip to another job for more money, and you start again with a new hire.

Thankfully after many generations of human interactions and complex analysis of group dynamics, we've found a solution. It's called 'don't be an asshole' and 'pay people competitively'.

edit: because people are stupid, 'competitively' in this sense isn't some theoretical number pulled from an average, it's 'does this person feel better off financially working with you than others around them who don't work with you, and is is this person meeting their own personal financial goals through working with you'?

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

#119

Post by falcor84 »

Simulacra wrote: post #116
falcor84 wrote: post #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, a…

My friend works in legislative affairs for the government, and he uses the AI to reason with himself. To think through issues, and to generate new ideas. He uses it much like a private colleague, which in the world of just words, seems like a good idea.

I wonder if in the future we might have e2e tests for legislative changes - essentially spawning an instance (or a few dozens) of the Matrix with new parameters to assess the likely impact of those changes.

Like Black Mirror's "Hang the DJ" but on a societal/global level.

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

#120

Post by tjansen »

codr7 wrote: post #99
tjansen wrote: post #69

These 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.

I guess it turned out that coding is not the only limiting factor. Internal processes, QA, product management, coordination between teams become significant bottlenecks .

Also, they don’t help much with debugging. It’s worth a try, and I have been surprised a couple of times, but it’s mostly still manual.

Post reply on HN