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

101–110 of 399 posts

Re: AI is making junior devs useless

#101

Post by skeledrew »

somenameforme wrote: post #72
epgui wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

All that humanity has achieved happened due to the simple loop of identifying a desire/need and finding a way to satisfy it. Also known as reinforcement learning. The only thing that really differentiates humans from machines is... history. We've been learning and passing on our knowledge to successive generations over millennia. Nothing really special there; give the machines a few years to learn and see what happens.

Re: AI is making junior devs useless

#102

Post by lenerdenator »

You're going to have to do the unthinkable:

Invest in the training of your junior employees.

The cost of generating code is now laughable, so that's not the economic value brought to the table by a junior engineer, or really, any engineer. The value is now generated by knowing what code is good code. You're going to have to have talks, book clubs, hackathons, and the like to get your juniors to know what good code is. Do they know what design patterns are? How about good architecture? If they can't name a few design patterns, you're not investing enough.

Re: AI is making junior devs useless

#103

Post by skeledrew »

PetoU wrote: post #56
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.

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

What is a "real-world novelty" and what prevents AI from touching it?

Re: AI is making junior devs useless

#104

Post by ndriscoll »

Thanemate wrote: post #24
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.

>AI is an incredible teaching tool. As a junior, my top issue is finding valuable learning material that isn't full of poor or outright wrong information. In the best and most generous interpretation of your statement, LLM's simply removed my need to search for the information. That doesn't mean it's not of poor quality or outright wrong.

I suspect that the quality is ironically correlated with the expertise of the user (i.e. it is knowledgeable if you are knowledgeable), which puts you in a conundrum (I can report that with a couple decades of experience, LLMs are giving me high quality, correct results, but I can already see that it somehow doesn't work as well for some of my less experienced colleagues. A lot of what I've been doing over the last couple months is trying to find how to make it "just work" for them.).

As a general principle, take advantage of the fact that it can easily generate stuff. If you don't know whether something is true, have it prove it. Make a PoC/test/benchmark to demonstrate what it's saying. Have it pull metrics that you have access to. Add more observability. Create feedback loops (or rather, ask it to create feedback loops). They're very good at reasoning given access to the ground truth, so give them more ability to ground themselves.

They also have fantastic knowledge of public things, but no knowledge of your company, so your instructions should mostly be documentation of what's unique to your company. If it can write an instruction on its own (e.g. how to use git or kubernetes), it is a useless instruction; it already knows that. What it doesn't know is e.g. where your git server is. It also doesn't know what matters to your company: are you a startup trying to find product market fit? Are you an established company that is not allowed to break customer setups? etc. You might even be able to ask it what kinds of questions a senior might ask about how a company/team works when coming into a new job, and then see if you can answer those questions (or find someone who can). In fact, go ask chatgpt:

> What are some questions a senior engineer might ask when coming into a new role to make themselves more effective?

> What are some questions a principle engineer might ask when coming into a new role to make themselves more effective?

> What are some questions an engineering manager might ask when coming into a new role to make themselves more effective?

> What are some questions an engineering director might ask when coming into a new role to make themselves more effective?

Re: AI is making junior devs useless

#105

Post by dude250711 »

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…

> ...not because you wanted them to contribute, but because you wanted them to learn to contribute.

Rather because you want them to go away, because management conveniently forgot to reduce your load to account for time spent on mentoring.

Re: AI is making junior devs useless

#106

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

Re: AI is making junior devs useless

#107

Post by idontwantthis »

adamtaylor_13 wrote: post #13

I 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…

Why are you paying them instead of running the AI yourself?

Re: AI is making junior devs useless

#108

Post by eloisant »

raw_anon_1111 wrote: post #65
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…

What’s the importance of then learning to contribute if they will probably jump ship anyway when they get good enough? Your HR department is not going to give them a market rate raise to keep them - see salary compression and inversion. A junior developer just isn’t worth the investment. I have never once told my manager “it would be really nice to have a few junior developers. It would really help us get this projec…

Treat your employees well and they won't jump ship.

Re: AI is making junior devs useless

#109

Post by estimator7292 »

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…

Innovation is irrelevant to pushing up this quarter's numbers. No one actually values unique and novel ideas. The only thing that matters is shipping something right now that can make an impact on this quarter's numbers.

Who cares if it's derivative slop or a straight up bootleg of something else so long as the number goes up

Re: AI is making junior devs useless

#110

Post by dude250711 »

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.

> If you want seniors, you must let the juniors write the code.

I do not want more juniors, because given time they will be my competition.

Post reply on HN