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

191–200 of 481 posts

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

#191

Post by darkbatman »

jaggederest wrote: post #154
ay wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Read diligently" - that’s a very optimistic statement. I can not count how many times Claude (LLM I am most familiar with, I had it write probably about 100KLOC in the past few months) explicitly disobeyed what was written in the instructions. Also, a good few times, if it were a human doing the task, I would have said they both failed to follow the instructions and lied about it and attempted to pretend they didn’t…

Claude has really gone downhill in the last month or so. They made a change to move the CLAUDE.md from the system prompt to being occasionally read in, and it really deprioritizes the instructions to the same attention level as the code it's working on. I've been trying out Codex the last couple days and it's much more adherent and much less prone to lying and laziness. Anthropic says they're working on a significant…

true, I was using Cline/Roocode from almost an year and it always made sure to read things from memory-bank which i really liked. Claude has gone downhill from August mid for me and often it doesn't follow instructions from claude.md or forget things mid-way.

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

#192

Post by mensetmanusman »

gnerd00 wrote: post #188
mensetmanusman wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That only proves the point. If something increases the value of someone’s time by 5% and 500,000,000 people are affected by it, the cost will collapse.

These models are only going to get better and cheaper per watt.

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

#194

Post by glouwbug »

DarkNova6 wrote: post #183
glouwbug wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I fail to see the causality.

High interest rates bring layoffs. Layoffs require performance, or at least perceived performance

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

#195

Post by fsloth »

skydhash wrote: post #166
fsloth wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This. You _have_ to write the spec. The result is that instead of spending X units of time on spec and THEN y units of time on coding, you get the whole thing in x units of time AND you have a spec. The trick is knowning where the particular LLM sucks. I expect in a short amount of time there is no productivity gain but when you start to understand the limitations and strengths - holey moley.

> The result is that instead of spending X units of time on spec and THEN y units of time on coding, you get the whole thing in x units of time AND you have a spec. It's more like x units of time thinking and y units of times coding, whereas I see people spend x/2 thinking, x typing the specs, y correcting the specs, and y giving up and correcting the code.

Sure! That's inefficient. I know just how I work and I've been writing the type of programs I do for quite many years. And I know what would take me normally a week takes me few days at best.

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

#196

Post by dingnuts »

fluidcruft wrote: post #182
Hendrikto wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

LLMs might make you feel faster (which helps with motivation!) and help with some of the very easy stuff but the critical part of your anecdote is that you haven't actually completed the extra work. The projects are only "NEARING" completion. I think that's very telling.

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

#197

Post by smsm42 »

ay wrote: post #137
raincole wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At least you can ask AI to summarize a AGENT.md or something and it will read it diligently next time. As for humans, they might not have the motivation technical writing skill to document what they learnt. And even if they did, the next person might not have the patience to actually read it.

"Read diligently" - that’s a very optimistic statement. I can not count how many times Claude (LLM I am most familiar with, I had it write probably about 100KLOC in the past few months) explicitly disobeyed what was written in the instructions. Also, a good few times, if it were a human doing the task, I would have said they both failed to follow the instructions and lied about it and attempted to pretend they didn’t…

Psychopatic behavior seems to be a major problem for these (of course it doesn't think so it can't be called that but that's the closest term that fits). They are trained to arrive at the result, and if the most likely path to it is faking it and lying about it, then that's what you are getting. And if you find it, it will cheerfully admit it and try to make s better lie that you'd believe.

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

#198

Post by peteforde »

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?

I am so tired of this style of "don't believe your lying eyes" conjecture.

I'm a career coder and I used LLMs primarily to rapidly produce code for domains that I don't have deep experience in. Instead of spending days or weeks getting up to speed on an SDK I might need once, I have a pair programmer that doesn't check their phone or need to pick up their kids at 4:30pm.

If you don't want to use LLMs, nobody is forcing you. Burning energy trying to convince people to whom the benefits of LLMs are self-evident many times over that they are imagining things is insulting the intelligence of everyone in the conversation.

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

#199

Post by bluefirebrand »

intended wrote: post #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.

This is the crux of why I think AI code is a waste of time

It is much more difficult and time consuming to build a mental model of AI generated code and verify it than to build the damn thing yourself and verify it while it is fresh in your memory

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

#200

Post by smsm42 »

wiseowise wrote: post #172
Avicebron wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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,…

They do have a point. Why waste a time on person who will always need more money over time, rather than invest in AI? Not only you don’t need to please every hire, your seniors will be more thankful too, because they will get linearly faster with time.

Outside of working for Antropic etc., there's no way you can make an LLM better at anything. You can train a junior though.
Post reply on HN