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

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

#221

Post by fluidcruft »

exe34 wrote: post #211
fluidcruft wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I don't think that's correct. That could be true if I were primarily a programmer, but I am not. I'm mostly a certified medical physicist working in a hospital. Programming is a skill that is helpful and I have spent my programming time building other tools that I need. But that list is gigantic, the software that is available for purchase is all complete crap, the market is too small for investment, etc. That's all to say the things I am building are desperately needed but my time for programming is limited and it's not what brings home the bacon and there's no money to be made (beyond consulting, essentially these things might possibly work as tools for consultants). I don't have resources for professional programming staff but I have worked with them in the past and (no offense to most of HN) but the lack of domain knowledge tends to waste even more of my time.

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

#222

Post by thenanyu »

b112 wrote: post #85
omneity wrote: post #84

I 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…

dude I think you’re one-shotted

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

#223

Post by bigfishrunning »

victorbjorklund wrote: post #208
fluidcruft wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

100% this. The AI missunderstands and make a mistake? No problem. Clarify and the AI will come back with a rewrite in 30 sec.

A rewrite with another, more subtle mistake. That you must spend energy discovering and diagnosing.

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

#225

Post by cowLamp »

i think it is due to the reverse utility curve; most products have some sort of gaussian utilty fuction for utility vs. expertise level. a complete newb will have trouble using the camera and a professional photographer will be limited by it, but most people in-between will get a lot of use out of it.

with llm’s it is opposite; a complete newb can learn some stuff, and an expert will be able to detect when it is bullshitting, but most people will be at a point where they have more knowledge about the subject the llm is talking about than the newb, but not enough to detect the bs.

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

#226

Post by phendrenad2 »

Tasks usually come from the top down. Seniors design the architecture, mid-levels figure out ancillary tasks, and they generate "tedious" tasks that they hand off to juniors. With the aid of LLMs, many of those tasks don't make it to lower levels. So they run out of simple tasks for juniors, and end up giving them more advanced projects, making them de facto midrangers.

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

#227

Post by heelix »

KolibriFly wrote: post #47
jacquesm wrote: post #4

For the same reason that an amateur with a powertool ends up in the emergency room and a seasoned pro knows which way to point the business end. AI is in many ways a powertool, if you don't know what you are doing it will help you to do that much more efficiently. If you do know what you are doing it will do the same.

Power tools don't magically make you a carpenter - they just amplify whatever level of skill you already bring

One of my favorite memories of my grandfather was - Any power tool becomes a sander if you use it wrong.

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

#229

Post by fluidcruft »

bigfishrunning wrote: post #223
victorbjorklund wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

100% this. The AI missunderstands and make a mistake? No problem. Clarify and the AI will come back with a rewrite in 30 sec.

A rewrite with another, more subtle mistake. That you must spend energy discovering and diagnosing.

How is that different from working with a n00b except that it only took 30sec to get to the next bug rather than a week?

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

#230

Post by square_usual »

cmiles74 wrote: post #216
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.

> work mentoring the AI strikes me as less valuable then the same time spent mentoring a junior developer

But where can you just "mentor" a junior? Hiring people is not so easy, especially not ones that are worth mentoring. Not every junior will be a willing, good recipient of mentoring, and that's if you manage to get one, given budget constraints and long lead times on hiring. And at best you end up with one or two; with parallel LLMs, you can have almost entire teams of people working for you.

I'm not arguing for replacing juniors - I worry about the same thing you do - but I can see why companies are so eager to use AI, especially smaller startups that don't have the budgets and manpower to hire people.

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