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.
AI is making junior devs useless
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Re: AI is making junior devs useless
#12I 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.
I always say "own the output". No need to do it by hand but you better damn well research _why_ the AI chose a solution, and what alternatives there are and why not something else, how it works and so on. Ask the AI, ask a seperate agent/model, Google for it, I don't care, but "I don't know the LLM told me" is not acceptable.
Re: AI is making junior devs useless
#13I can't seem to get the article to load, but I think I get the gist from the title.
I hired a junior "dev" who literally hadn't even completed an HTML course. Before AI I could not have hired them because they literally did not know how to dev. After AI, anyone with a little grit can push themselves into the field pretty easily.
As with everything in life: you can choose to hard route or you can choose the easy route and your results will follow accordingly.
Re: AI is making junior devs useless
#14Yes 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.
Re: AI is making junior devs useless
#15I assume junior devs can at least search. AI often doesn't even do that. That's why there are things like context7, which in a narrow context helps but not perfect.
There are lots of ambiguous situations where a search and human "inference" can solve that AI still can't.
I can tell the AI to do something, it uses the worst approach, I tell it a better way exists, it says it validated it does not, I link to a GitHub issue saying it can be done via workarounds and it still fails. It's worse for longer tasks where it always shortcuts to if it fails pick a "safe" approach (including not doing it).
Funny enough we need the junior to guide the AI.
Re: AI is making junior devs useless
#16I 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?
Re: AI is making junior devs useless
#17I 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.
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Re: AI is making junior devs useless
#18I can't seem to get the article to load, but I think I get the gist from the title. I hired a junior "dev" who literally hadn't even completed an HTML course. Before AI I could not have hired them because they literally did not know how to dev. After AI, anyone with a little grit can push themselves into the field pretty easily. As with everything in life: you can choose to hard route or you can choose the easy route…
>> who literally hadn't even completed an HTML course.
so what is their value? proxy your requests to ai?
Re: AI is making junior devs useless
#19Junior 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.
It’s gonna take a long time for that to become the norm I think. I really wish I could take 5 years off while everyone figures this out.
Re: AI is making junior devs useless
#20The "Junior Trap" is real: if you offload your thinking to Claude or GPT-4, you’re hitting "Done" for the day, but you’re accruing massive Learning Debt. You aren't building the failure-pattern recognition that actually makes an engineer valuable.
In a world where "Code is no longer a skill," the only way to survive is to stop being a "Prompt Operator" and start being a "System Auditor." If you can’t explain the trade-offs of the architectural pattern the AI just gave you, you aren't an engineer, you're just the person holding the screwdriver while the machine builds the house.