Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

AI is making junior devs useless

beabetterdev.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–80 of 399 posts

Re: AI is making junior devs useless

#71

Post by hluska »

> If I’m reviewing your code and I ask you why you went with a certain approach, and you tell me “the AI suggested it”, I’ve immediately lost confidence in you.

I’ve experienced similar things and so understand the feeling, but this is poor leadership. If someone on your team makes it all the way to a code review and still thinks ‘the AI suggested it’, you failed to train them, failed to set expectations and they have justifiably lost more confidence in you than vice versa.

If we analyze the rest of the article through the lens of weak leadership, it sounds less like an AI problem and more like a corporate leadership problem.

Re: AI is making junior devs useless

#72

Post by somenameforme »

epgui wrote: post #47
pluc wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I think this can be falsified by just considering the history of humanity. It wasn't that long ago that human language literally did not even exist. And our collective knowledge wasn't all that much more than 'poke him with the pointy end'. Somehow we went from that to putting a man on the Moon, unlocking the secrets of the atom, and more. And if you consider how awful we are at retaining/sharing information and just general inefficiencies due to the fact that we're humans and not just logical information processing machines, we did all of this in little more than the blink of an eye. This is something that seems to certainly be rather special.

Re: AI is making junior devs useless

#73

Post by debone »

PetoU wrote: post #34
pluc wrote: post #26

I 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…

fwiw 90% of software is reinventing the wheel. 80% of devs have an itch to "rewrite from scratch". AI will deduplicate all of this

My experience is that 100% of AI devs are reinventing the wheel, most of the time for no better reason than "I can do it" or "not invented here"

Re: AI is making junior devs useless

#74

Post by hluska »

sunir wrote: post #53
pluc wrote: post #26

I 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…

Why would there be a lack of original ideas? People who are born to code so to speak will do it. Information wants to be free as the saying goes. It only takes one time for an innovation for it to be to copied everywhere. We don’t need the same volume of developers to have the same or faster speed of innovation. And conversely if there is stagnation there is a capital opportunity to out compete it and so there will b…

That’s the big scary point at the crux of all of this - you’ve had decades without the tooling to develop instincts. Nobody knows whether it’s possible to develop instincts with the tooling or what those instincts will look like. Creativity takes a degree of skill to execute on and the concern is that we’re potentially graduating people to painting the ceiling of the Sistine chapel before they’ve even learned to sketch.

At minimum, our current generation of leaders will have to get much better at managing resources and building people up. We have to up our games and build environments where the pursuit of deep understanding is permissible. Unfortunately with the current hiring issues, it’s totally understandable that young developers are scared to take time on tickets.

Re: AI is making junior devs useless

#75

Post by Retric »

BobbyJo wrote: post #45

Junior 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…

I’ve gotten plenty of use out of junior devs. The critical bit is what makes anyone a useful worker. I’ve found anyone that’s both dedicated and meticulous is worth the investment.

Sure there’s a wide range of skills and you can’t just hand any task to anyone and expect it to work out but some fresh collage graduates are more capable than the average person with 5 years of professional experience. At the other end you need to focus on whatever they actually are capable of doing. 40+ hours a week can slowly expand even an extremely narrow skillet as long as they’re a hard worker.

Re: AI is making junior devs useless

#76

Post by [deleted] »

fluidcruft wrote: post #61
Tharre wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Seniors come from juniors. If you want seniors, you must let the juniors write the code. Companies know this as well, but this is a prisoner dilemma type situation for them. A company can skip out on juniors, and instead offer to pay seniors a bit better to poach them from other companies, saving money. If everyone starts doing this, everyone obviously loses - there just won't be enough new seniors to satisfy deman…

The way other professions do this is by burying trainees with debt and then writing off debt if they stay.

[deleted]

Re: AI is making junior devs useless

#78

Post by smallstepforman »

recursivedoubts wrote: post #10

As 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.

The challenge is to get cost sensitive businesses to support this. Juniors are a cost and when trained move on, thats the fundamental problem. Retention only works with smart companues, for most other companies its a revolving door.

On the plus side, as a dev with 30+ years of experience, I am commanding a very good contract salary these days. Revolving door companies stuck in process hell and product rot, and cannot deliver new value, so they’re scrambling to find experienced devs that cost a premium. My salary today makes up for peanuts at the start of my career.

Re: AI is making junior devs useless

#79

Post by PetoU »

pluc wrote: post #67
PetoU wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

that's only partially true. AI can innovate in synthetic-realm of novel ideas, while real-world novelty will remain untouched. There are different types of novelties

If AI could innovate it wouldn't be a public product. It would be a cash cow. Why give your customers the ability to come up with new and amazing ideas when you can just keep it for yourself and launch a thousand products? USA is a capitalist society. It doesn't share profitable ideas. And if AI was really about productivity they'd be talking about doing more faster with the same workforce, not reducing the workforce…

if you like, the business model is called Innovation-as-a-Service :)

That's perfectly aligned with capitalistic motivations

Re: AI is making junior devs useless

#80

Post by nkmnz »

sarchertech wrote: post #14
garyfirestorm wrote: post #11

Yes and no. Often times managers are now asking ask Claude code to write it but I want it delivered tomorrow. This leads to us forcing to use LLM generated code without enough time to review or understand it.

I hope you don’t have actual users.

Don't worry, he works for the DoW.
Post reply on HN