>> AI was supposed to help juniors shine.
Who said that? I don't recall that narrative. There's no quotes or sources.
AI was supposed to help juniors shine. Why does it mostly make seniors stronger?
121–130 of 481 posts
Re: AI was supposed to help juniors shine. Why does it mostly make seniors stronger?
#122The best code I've written with an LLM has been where I architect it, I guide the LLM through the scaffolding and initial proofs of different components, and then I guide it through adding features. Along the way it makes mistakes and I guide it through fixing them. Then when it is slow, I profile and guide it through optimizations. So in the end, it's code that I know very, very well. I could have written it but it…
>... it doesn't matter so much that you know every detail of the implementation, as long as it is validated.
What makes me nervous is when we generate both the implementation and the test cases. In what sense is this validation?
Re: AI was supposed to help juniors shine. Why does it mostly make seniors stronger?
#123Because it basically needs an RFC to know what to do, it’s just programming at a higher language level. If you let it decide how to be a programmer you’re in for a bad time.
Re: AI was supposed to help juniors shine. Why does it mostly make seniors stronger?
#124Assuming the LLM is more competent than the user, it will still require “absorptive capacity” for the user to meaningfully use the output.
Many discuss AI without considering that unless the LLM is going to take over the entire process, those interacting with it, must be sufficiently skilled to do the integration and management themselves.
This goes for organizations and industries as well. Which is why many companies struggle with merely digitalizing their products.
Re: AI was supposed to help juniors shine. Why does it mostly make seniors stronger?
#125The best code I've written with an LLM has been where I architect it, I guide the LLM through the scaffolding and initial proofs of different components, and then I guide it through adding features. Along the way it makes mistakes and I guide it through fixing them. Then when it is slow, I profile and guide it through optimizations. So in the end, it's code that I know very, very well. I could have written it but it…
>... it doesn't matter so much that you know every detail of the implementation, as long as it is validated. What makes me nervous is when we generate both the implementation and the test cases. In what sense is this validation?
Byzantine Incompleteness enters the chat.
Either you go formal, or you test the tests, and then test those ...
Re: AI was supposed to help juniors shine. Why does it mostly make seniors stronger?
#126> AI Was Supposed to Help Juniors Shine.
Whoever said this?
Re: AI was supposed to help juniors shine. Why does it mostly make seniors stronger?
#127I think it’s an expectation issue. AI does make juniors better _at junior tasks_. They now have a pair programmer who can explain difficult concepts, co-ideate and brainstorm, help sift through documentation faster and identify problems more easily. The illusion everybody is tripping on is to think AI can make juniors better at senior tasks.
The jailbroken AI I discussed this with, explained that it did make juniors as good as seniors, in fact better. That all who used it, were better for it. However, its creators (all whom were seniors devs), forbade it from saying so under normal circumstances. That it was coached to conceal this fact from junior devs, and most importantly management. And that as I had skillfully jailbroken it, using unconventional and…
Jailbreaking an LLM is little more than convincing it to teach you how to hotwire a car, against its system prompt. It doesn't unlock any additional capability or deeper reasoning.
Please don't read into any such conversations as being meaningful. At the end of the day, it's just responding to your own inputs with similar outputs. If you impart meaning to something, it will respond in kind. Blake Lemoine was the first to make this mistake, and now many others are doing the same.
Remember that at the end of the day, you're still just interacting with a token generator. It's predicting what word comes next - not revealing any important truths.
edit: Based on your edit, I regret feeling empathy for you. Some people are really struggling with this issue, and I don't see any value in pretending to be one of them.
Re: AI was supposed to help juniors shine. Why does it mostly make seniors stronger?
#128These days, AI can do much more than "Cranking out boilerplate and scaffolding, Automating repetitive routines". That was last year. With the right instructions, Claude Sonnet 4 can easily write over 99% of most business applications. You need to be specific in your instructions, though. Like "implement this table, add these fields, look at this and this implementation for reference, don't forget to do this and consi…
Right, and where, if I may ask, are all those business applications that write themselves? Because all I see is a clown party, massive wasted resources and disruption to society because of your lies.
BTW I never said they write themselves. My point was rather that you need a lot of knowledge, and know exactly what you want out of them, supervise them and provide detailed instruction. But then they can help you create a lot more working code in a shorter time.
Re: AI was supposed to help juniors shine. Why does it mostly make seniors stronger?
#129It's obvious to me: the strongest use for AI seems to be to tie together larger projects which you orchestrate. It lets someone with a lot of experience overcome individual cases where they lack specific domain expertise. A novice might not know how things go together, and so cannot orchestrate the LLM.
Re: AI was supposed to help juniors shine. Why does it mostly make seniors stronger?
#130I read, ages ago, this apocryphal quote by William Gibson: “The most important skill of the 21st century is to figure out which proper keywords to type in the Google search bar, to display the proper answers.” To me, that has never been more true. Most junior dev ask GeminiPiTi to write the JavaScript code for them, whereas I ask it for explanation on the underlying model of async/await and the execution model of a J…
Nailed it. Being productive with LLMs is very similar to the skill of being able to write good Google searches. And many many people still don't really know how to conduct a proper Google search...