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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?

#211

Post by exe34 »

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…

> 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.

that's the issue in the argument though. it could be that those projects would also have been completed in the same time if you had simply started working on them. but honestly, if it makes you feel productive to the point you're doing more work than you would do without the drug, I'd say keep taking it. watch out for side effects and habituation though.

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

#212

Post by lumost »

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?

Anecdotally, on green field projects where you are exploring a new domain - it’s an insanely productive experience. On mundane day to day tasks it probably takes more time, but feels like less mental bandwidth.

Coding at full throttle is a very intensive task that requires deep focus. There are many days that I simply don’t have that in me.

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

#213

Post by victorbjorklund »

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.

You can make the same argument about humans. The employeer doesnt pay the full cost and time to create the worker from an embryo to a senior dev.

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

#214

Post by victorbjorklund »

smsm42 wrote: post #200
wiseowise wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You can def provide better context etc.

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

#215

Post by lazide »

Den_VR wrote: post #95
lazide wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

When you ask it for information and it just makes it up (like I just described), how is that helping the senior?

I’ve literally asked for details about libraries I know exist by name, and had every llm I’ve tried (Claude, Gemini Pro, ChatGPT) just make shit up that sounded about right, but was actually just-wrong-enough-to-lead-me-on-a-useless-rabbit-hole-search.

At least most people on stackoverflow saying that kind of thing were somewhat obviously kind of dumb or didn’t know what they were doing.

Like function calls with wrong args (or spelled slightly differently), capitalization being wrong (but one of the ‘okay’ ways), wrong paths and includes.

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

#216

Post by cmiles74 »

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 can see how this workflow made the senior developer faster. At the same time, work mentoring the AI strikes me as less valuable then the same time spent mentoring a junior developer. If this ends up encouraging an ever widening gap between the skill levels of juniors and seniors, I think that would be bad for the field, overall.

Getting that kind of data is difficult, right now it's just something I worry about.

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

#217

Post by sndisjh »

peteforde wrote: post #198
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?

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 forci…

> used LLMs primarily to rapidly produce code for domains that I don't have deep experience in

You’re either trusting the LLM or you still have to pay the cost of getting the experience you don’t have. So in either case you’re not going too much faster - the formers cost not being apparent until it’s much more expensive later on.

Edit: assuming you don’t struggle with typing speed, basic syntax, APIs etc. These are not significant cost reductions for experts, though they are for juniors.

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

#218

Post by onionisafruit »

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…

So true. I have some non-typical preferences for code style. One example is I don’t like nested error checks in Go. It’s not a correctness issue, it’s just a readability preference. Claude and copilot continually ignore this no matter how much emphasis I give it in the instructions. I recently found a linter for this, and the agent will fix it when the linter points out the issue.

This is probably because the llm is trained on millions of lines of Go with nested error checks vs a few lines of contrary instructions in the instructions file.

I keep fighting this because I want to understand my tools, not because I care that much about this one preference.

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

#219

Post by flustercan »

cjonas wrote: post #136
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…

Ya the early "studies" that said AI would benefit low skill more than senior never seem grounded in reality. Coding with AI is like having a team of juniors that can complete their assignments in a few minutes instead of days. The more clear your instructions, the closer it is to what you wanted, but there are almost always changes needed. Unfortunately it really does make the junior dev position redundant (although…

I've never worked anywhere where the role of a Sr was to glue together a bunch of small pieces written by a team of Jr devs.

I've only worked places where Jr's were given roughly the same scope of work as a mid-level dev but on non-critical projects where they could take as much time as necessary and where mistakes would have a very small blast radius.

That type of Jr work has not been made redundant - although I suppose now its possible for a PM or designer to do that work instead (but if your PMs are providing more value by vibe coding non-critical features than by doing their PM work maybe you don't really need a PM?)

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

#220

Post by dgs_sgd »

The article says that more juniors + AI was the early narrative, but where does that come from?

Everything I’ve read has been the opposite. I thought people from the beginning saw that AI would amplify a senior’s skills and leave less opportunities for juniors.

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