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

181–190 of 481 posts

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

#181

Post by pkilgore »

Hendrikto wrote: post #71
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 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?

You aren't wrong in the coaching but, but feedback loops are orders of magnitude faster.

It takes an LLM 2-20 minutes to give me the next stage of output not 1-2 days (week?). As a result, I have higher context the entire time so my side of the iteration is maybe 10x faster too.

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

#182

Post by fluidcruft »

Hendrikto wrote: post #71
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 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?

True but the n00b is very fast. A lot of coaching is waiting for the n00b to perform tasks and meta things about motivation. These LLM are extremely fast and eager to work.

I don't need a study to tell me that five projects that have been stuck in slow plodding along waiting for me to ever have time or resources for nearly ten years. But these are now nearing completion after only two months of picking up Claude Code. And with high-quality implementations that were feverdreams.

My background is academic science not professional programming though and the output quality and speed of Claude Code is vastly better than what grad students generate. But you don't trust grad student code either. The major difference here is that suggestions for improvement loop in minutes rather than weeks or months. Claude will get the science wrong, but so do grad students.

(But sure technically they are not finished yet ... but yeah)

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

#183

Post by DarkNova6 »

glouwbug wrote: post #153
DarkNova6 wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

In the age of high interest rates everyone is pushing quantity over quality

I fail to see the causality.

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

#184

Post by [deleted] »

JustExAWS wrote: post #140
Simulacra wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That’s actually a horrible use of most chatbots if you don’t specifically prompt them to give you a devil’s advocate take.

[deleted]

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

#185

Post by perrygeo »

chasd00 wrote: post #111
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.

Yep, and the productivity of LLMs means that experienced developers can go from idea to implementation way faster. But first someone has to understand and define a solid structure. And later someone needs to review, test, and integrate the code into this framework. This is hard stuff. Arguably harder than writing code in the first place!

It's no wonder inexperienced developers don't get as much out of it. They define a vague structure, full of problems, but the sycophantic AI will spew out conformant code anyways. Garbage in, garbage out. Bad ideas + fast code gen is just not very productive in the long term - LLMs have made the quality of ideas matter again!

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

#186

Post by BobbyTables2 »

This question shouldn’t even need to be asked.

Look at a decade of StackOverflow use.

Did YouTube turn medical interns into world class doctors?

AI is just the next generation search engine that isn’t as stupid as a plain keyword match.

In some sense, it’s just PageRank on steroids — applied to words instead of URLs.

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

#188

Post by gnerd00 »

mensetmanusman wrote: post #131
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.

The AI in this example is 1/100 the cost.

that is absolutely false - the capital and resources used to create these things are societal scale. An individual consumer is not paying that cost at this time.

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

#189

Post by darkbatman »

Mostly agree with article, though what happens in few years when juniors will eventually become senior.

Personally seeing trend juniors are relying so much on AI that they can't even explain what they wrote even in interview or coding assignments or even PR. Its like blackbox to them.

I believe then we would see the higher impact or may be by then its solved problem already.

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

#190

Post by inejge »

If anything, AI was supposed -- still is -- to thin out the ranks of ever-expensive human employees. That's why it attracted such a huge pile of investment and universal cheerleading from the C levels. What we're seeing right now that there's not so much "I" in AI, and it still needs a guiding hand to keep its results relevant. Hence, the senior advantage. How much it's going to undermine regular generational enployee replacement (because "we don't need juniors anymore", right?) remains to be seen. Maybe we're in for different training paths, maybe a kind of population collapse.
Post reply on HN