tl;dr ask why
AI is making junior devs useless
41–50 of 399 posts
Re: AI is making junior devs useless
#42I can't wait until the AI people realize that without developers' original ideas, AI has nothing new to steal from. We don't create, AI will spit out the same old concepts. What, you're gonna create the next generation of AI by training it on what the very same AI has already produced? C'mon now. You don't get technical creativity reflexes by using AI. This is technical stagnation in the making. By cannibalizing its…
It isn’t about training anymore. It is about harnesses. Just look at new math proofs that will come out, as one example. Exploration vs Exploitation is a thing in AI but you seem to think that human creativity can’t be surpassed by harnesses and prompts like “generate 100 types of possible…” You’re wrong. What you call creativity is often a manual application of a simple self-prompt that people do. One can have a loo…
There is no "new ideas" with AI. Claiming the opposite is a fundamental misunderstanding of the technology.
Re: AI is making junior devs useless
#43I can't wait until the AI people realize that without developers' original ideas, AI has nothing new to steal from. We don't create, AI will spit out the same old concepts. What, you're gonna create the next generation of AI by training it on what the very same AI has already produced? C'mon now. You don't get technical creativity reflexes by using AI. This is technical stagnation in the making. By cannibalizing its…
Re: AI is making junior devs useless
#44I can't wait until the AI people realize that without developers' original ideas, AI has nothing new to steal from. We don't create, AI will spit out the same old concepts. What, you're gonna create the next generation of AI by training it on what the very same AI has already produced? C'mon now. You don't get technical creativity reflexes by using AI. This is technical stagnation in the making. By cannibalizing its…
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Re: AI is making junior devs useless
#45Junior devs have always been useless. You used to give them tasks that take them a week or two even though a senior engineer could do it in a couple hours, not because you wanted them to contribute, but because you wanted them to learn to contribute.
The same ethos makes sense with AI, it's just that every company is trying to avoid paying that training tax. Why turn a junior into a senior yourself if you can get the competition to pay for it instead.
Re: AI is making junior devs useless
#46As I tell my students: juniors, you must write the code https://htmx.org/essays/yes-and/ Everyone else: we must let the juniors write the code. Seniors come from juniors. If you want seniors, you must let the juniors write the code.
It’s already getting harder to find juniors willing to write the code and harder to discern whether someone is as willing as they say. And I feel like asking junior to make this decision and just have self control is a tricky double edged sword. Even if I want them to (and I do!) the competitive and ambitious juniors I suspect will still lean into AI code gen heavily as it makes them look better and seem more productive. Seniors probably need to do more than let them write the code, we probably need to figure out ways to encourage, require, or even enforce it at some level, if we want it to happen.
Re: AI is making junior devs useless
#47Earlier quoted context omitted.
It isn’t about training anymore. It is about harnesses. Just look at new math proofs that will come out, as one example. Exploration vs Exploitation is a thing in AI but you seem to think that human creativity can’t be surpassed by harnesses and prompts like “generate 100 types of possible…” You’re wrong. What you call creativity is often a manual application of a simple self-prompt that people do. One can have a loo…
There is no "new ideas" with AI. Claiming the opposite is a fundamental misunderstanding of the technology.
While that’s kind of true in some sense, I think there’s an argument to be made for the contrary: that the mechanism for generating new ideas in humans is not quite as special as we would like to think.
In other words, creativity in humans is arguably just as derivative as in machines.
Re: AI is making junior devs useless
#48I 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.
A teacher who just gives you the solution isn’t a good teacher. You can use AI as a teacher but how many will do that?
Highly motivated people will use whatever tools they have to get better at something, whether they have a textbook, the internet or a LLM to use.
The skill of the very top programmers will continue to increase with the advent of new tools.
Re: AI is making junior devs useless
#49My nightmare scenario (which might start to materilize) is that our last years in the industry will be becoming prompt monkies / agent "managers" working on codebases we barely understand in such velocity there's no way we can gain real understanding. Whenever something breaks (and it will , a lot) A.I will fix it - or so we'll hope. And the sad thing is - this might work; you'll get more stuff done with fewer people. Sure, we didn't sign up for this, it's not a fun job what I've described, but why should management care? They have their own problems and A.I is threatening their jobs as well.
Re: AI is making junior devs useless
#50Earlier quoted context omitted.
It isn’t about training anymore. It is about harnesses. Just look at new math proofs that will come out, as one example. Exploration vs Exploitation is a thing in AI but you seem to think that human creativity can’t be surpassed by harnesses and prompts like “generate 100 types of possible…” You’re wrong. What you call creativity is often a manual application of a simple self-prompt that people do. One can have a loo…
There is no "new ideas" with AI. Claiming the opposite is a fundamental misunderstanding of the technology.
i don't think all sides of this discussion agree on what a "new idea" is. i am a very creative person but i've never had a truly original thought and i don't know how having one would be possible