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AI is making junior devs useless

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Re: AI is making junior devs useless

#2

Post by slibhb »

I think this concern is overblown. AI is an incredible teaching tool. It's probably better for teaching/explaining than for writing code. This will make the next generation of junior devs far more effective than previous generations. Not because they're skipping the fundamentals...because they have a better grasp of the fundamentals due to back-and-forth with infinitely patient AI teachers.

Re: AI is making junior devs useless

#3

Post by dangus »

This is going to be music to deaf ears.

Companies will continue to demand it (I know people working at companies that are literally looking at AI usage as an individual performance metric, puke emoji), and probably 95% of humans using pretty understandable human logic aren’t going to work harder than they need to on purpose.

I wish I had a solution. I think the jury is still out on whether programming will be a dead profession in a short number of years, replaced by technical protect operators.

Re: AI is making junior devs useless

#4

Post by dangus »

slibhb wrote: post #2

I think this concern is overblown. AI is an incredible teaching tool. It's probably better for teaching/explaining than for writing code. This will make the next generation of junior devs far more effective than previous generations. Not because they're skipping the fundamentals...because they have a better grasp of the fundamentals due to back-and-forth with infinitely patient AI teachers.

I do agree it’s a great tool, so much better than trying to hope and pray someone on the internet can help you with “I don’t understand this line of code.”

However, it’s got a lot of downsides too.

Re: AI is making junior devs useless

#5

Post by esafak »

Junior devs: you have an oracle you can pester incessantly. Make the most of it so you can learn to detect its mistakes, know when to push back, and what to ask of it. That's when you are in the clear. Juniors who merely parrot the LLM get fired.

Re: AI is making junior devs useless

#6

Post by DJBunnies »

slibhb wrote: post #2

I think this concern is overblown. AI is an incredible teaching tool. It's probably better for teaching/explaining than for writing code. This will make the next generation of junior devs far more effective than previous generations. Not because they're skipping the fundamentals...because they have a better grasp of the fundamentals due to back-and-forth with infinitely patient AI teachers.

Not in my experience. They just regurgitate code, and juniors don’t know if/why it’s good or bad and consequently can’t field questions on their PR.

“It’s what the LLM said.” - Great. Now go learn it and do it again yourself.

Re: AI is making junior devs useless

#8

Post by techpression »

slibhb wrote: post #2

I think this concern is overblown. AI is an incredible teaching tool. It's probably better for teaching/explaining than for writing code. This will make the next generation of junior devs far more effective than previous generations. Not because they're skipping the fundamentals...because they have a better grasp of the fundamentals due to back-and-forth with infinitely patient AI teachers.

Only for people who wants be taught, this argument keeps coming up again and again but people in general doesn’t want to learn how to fish, they want the fish on a plate ready to eat, so that they can continue scrolling. I see this a lot in juniors, they are solution seekers, not problem solvers, and AI makes this difference a lot worse.

Re: AI is making junior devs useless

#9

Post by moritonal »

When I started my career I heard people say almost verbatim "Stack overflow is making junior devs useless", with the idea all we did was copypaste scripts over. The same people failed, and the same people who can use the tools will succeed now.
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