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New junior developers can’t code

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Re: New junior developers can’t code

#111

Post by andyferris »

hnfong wrote: post #78
andyferris wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A reliable system will need a relatively formal “proof” that what it does is correct. Code is currently the easiest and most convenient encoding for lots of folks to express such logic. So they’ll need to learn to read the syntax even if they write less of it. So I think people will be able to put together lots of code with AI and not much programming experience, but there will be a need to ensure that it does the ri…

I really want to say you're right, but I'm afraid it's not necessarily true. Before we had computers and machines, humans did all the work. And you can't really reliably "code" humans. They misunderstand instructions. They disobey rules and regulations. They make mistakes. But society still strived with these unreliable humans that have no "proof" whatsoever that they'll do the job properly. In fact, these days we st…

Interesting.

I think we’ll always have code that will need to be “formal” and deterministic. Banks, voting machines, cryptography, pacemakers, rockets, etc may all need the kind of “precise” software we have today. Precise software for precise machines.

I’m now wondering if there may be a new category of programs, that are more wishy-washy yet useful in the kind of way an LLM can be today. Computer games aren’t really mission critical, for example, and I imagine we’ll see deep learning models and LLMs embedded one day. I could imagine a kid generating game logic, maps, content, etc through a more intuitive and less formal interface. I already get ChatGPT to help me cook dinner or any other number of less precise tasks. Who knows what other new kinds of automation may be this way - to produce something “good enough” like a person would.

Re: New junior developers can’t code

#112

Post by hnfong »

dartos wrote: post #101
hnfong wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While C compilers are technically not "black boxes", if you looked at lawyerly discussions about UB I don't think you can in full conscience say that `gcc -O2` is much better than a LLM.

They’re not black boxes at all. The code is all there and is deterministic. Sorry, but the peculiarities of one optimization level on one implementation of C do not affect my point at all.

I already said they are technically not black boxes. We are not in disagreement here.

The fact that code is all there and deterministic isn't sufficient. People use newer versions of compilers and you can't predict what the people who write compilers will do (people are black boxes). The compilers may do something you don't expect but still conform to the spec.

The point is that there is no one implementation of C. And the same is true for any other language too (to a lesser extent).

Unless you're coding against very specific versions of OS and compiler and runtime environment, you don't have code to inspect. You are not inspecting all the underlying dependencies when you write your code. You just assume they work.

It doesn't matter whether they are black boxes if you don't routinely inspect the boxes. Perhaps you do, but for most people they don't. So it doesn't matter as much.

Re: New junior developers can’t code

#113

Post by bananapub »

I remember saying this in 2003, too, when new grads couldn't sit down in front of an editor and produce a program from nothing, they could only modify existing ones with lots of hints. surprise, they almost all learnt and are now quite good seniors.

Re: New junior developers can’t code

#114

Post by AndrewDucker »

vunderba wrote: post #95
yellow_lead wrote: post #11

Todays junior dev that is copying AI code without understanding it, is the same as the junior dev several years ago who did the same with stack overflow code. This is a mindset, and I don't think AI code is changing the number of people with this mindset. What it may be doing though, is letting them get away with it for longer.

This comparison of coding assistants to Stack Overflow comes up a lot so I feel like it needs to be addressed. It is SIMILAR - it is not the same. There's a minimal element of interaction by virtue of the fact that SO code is usually not completely bespoke for the developer's requirements. They'll need to do things like change variable names, re-arrange some parts of it, etc. The junior dev using an integrated LLMs (…

Also, Stack Overflow regularly came with multiple solutions and comments on each solution discussing drawbacks and alternatives. I've learned a lot from those.

Re: New junior developers can’t code

#115

Post by kamaal »

code-faster wrote: post #47

The reason why these articles appear every 5 years is because many engineers pride themselves on how they solve problems. And then when they see people solving those problems without putting in the hard work that they had to put in, it really bothers them. This is a timeless post. We'll see it today. We'll see it in five years. We'll see it in 10 years.

>>many engineers pride themselves on how they solve problems.

Im guessing its only a matter of time we see newer programming languages specially invented to work in the LLM era. So the same old processes like ever before continue. You need to understand things in a fundamental way else you won't have a clue what is going on.

You could say you still need to have done a fair of code work without LLMs to work through difficult to find and fix bugs.

Re: New junior developers can’t code

#116

Post by kamaal »

chias wrote: post #16

When I was younger people derided us new junior developers who relied on compiling and running their code to see what it would do, instead of thinking deeply about it. Using a REPL is a sure sign of a weak mind. I feel like every 15 years or so you can just find-and-replace the name of the tech we decide is only for Not Real Programmers.

>>instead of thinking deeply about it.

Around a decade back, I was doing lots of work on 8-bit microcontrollers, and a fairly old programmer taught me how it was done. And I learned a lot from the approach.

Honestly speaking I had to do lots of paper work, and lots of incremental thinking on paper, testing the ideas along the way.

I'm guessing if you didn't have the print statement or a web page as an output, this is just how you work anyway.

The code did come insanely efficient and bug free. Its not for web dev, but there are its use cases.

Re: New junior developers can’t code

#117

Post by znpy »

> We’re at this weird inflection point in software development. Every junior dev I talk to has Copilot or Claude or GPT running 24/7. They’re shipping code faster than ever. But when I dig deeper into their understanding of what they’re shipping? That’s where things get concerning.

I assume that 20-30 years ago when juniors were using either ide-provided auto-completion or refactoring or gui designers some old graybeard developer had a similar reaction.

Nothing new under the sun.

On a different layer of thinking, it makes perfect sense. The more the computing industry progresses, the more it abstracts away from how the thing actually works.

I don't know the author of this post, but as a system engineer that works closely with many software engineers, there are so many of them that yap left and right about the code they wrote or the ecosystem around their main programming language but are completely hopeless to anything outside that scope. I've seen so many re-implement the wheel because they don't know about facilities provided by the operating system (let alone how to interface and make use of them).

There's so much stuff that's done by the kernel (linux) and could be re-used if somebody was able to dive into FFI and write the adequate wrappers. And that's just an example.

One might argue that junior developers are just starting at a higher level of abstraction.

Re: New junior developers can’t code

#118

Post by yodon »

znpy wrote: post #117

> We’re at this weird inflection point in software development. Every junior dev I talk to has Copilot or Claude or GPT running 24/7. They’re shipping code faster than ever. But when I dig deeper into their understanding of what they’re shipping? That’s where things get concerning. I assume that 20-30 years ago when juniors were using either ide-provided auto-completion or refactoring or gui designers some old graybe…

>I assume that 20-30 years ago when juniors were using either ide-provided auto-completion or refactoring or gui designers some old graybeard developer had a similar reaction.

You assume wrong. Source: was there at the time.

This time is genuinely different.

Re: New junior developers can’t code

#119

Post by gorbachev »

MattGrommes wrote: post #87

I had a similar thought the other day when playing with Deepseek-coder. I asked it to do a problem I had just figured in a system I didn't know (opencv). The code deepseek gave was basically the same as what I had figured out, which I was pretty impressed by. But then I thought that if I had just used that code as is, it probably would have worked but I wouldn't have learned anything about opencv. These new tools can…

> But then I thought that if I had just used that code as is, it probably would have worked but I wouldn't have learned anything about opencv.

A large majority of people would be very, very happy with this. I don't have to know how to fix my car to drive it and thank God for that!

I think it's wonderful that LLMs enable someone to create useful things without understanding what's happening under the hood.

I also hope those people don't claim to be / won't be hired as (senior) software engineers, though.

Re: New junior developers can’t code

#120

Post by znpy »

yodon wrote: post #118
znpy wrote: post #117

> We’re at this weird inflection point in software development. Every junior dev I talk to has Copilot or Claude or GPT running 24/7. They’re shipping code faster than ever. But when I dig deeper into their understanding of what they’re shipping? That’s where things get concerning. I assume that 20-30 years ago when juniors were using either ide-provided auto-completion or refactoring or gui designers some old graybe…

>I assume that 20-30 years ago when juniors were using either ide-provided auto-completion or refactoring or gui designers some old graybeard developer had a similar reaction. You assume wrong. Source: was there at the time. This time is genuinely different.

it's always "different this time"
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