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AI was supposed to help juniors shine. Why does it mostly make seniors stronger?

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Re: AI was supposed to help juniors shine. Why does it mostly make seniors stronger?

#151

Post by Dumblydorr »

lolive wrote: post #12

I 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…

The true path in Piano isn’t learning tricks. You start with the most basic pieces and work step by step up to harder ones. That’s how everyone I know has done in it my 26 years of playing. Tricks cheapens the actual music.

Chopin has beginners pieces too, many in our piano studio were first year pianists doing rain drop prelude, e minor prelude, or other beginner works like Bach.

Re: AI was supposed to help juniors shine. Why does it mostly make seniors stronger?

#152

Post by glouwbug »

hoppp wrote: post #150
bentt wrote: post #60

The 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…

Sounds like its faster to just write the code by hand

The massive productivity gains I’ve seen come from multidisciplinary approaches, where you’d be applying science and engineering from fields like chemistry, physics, thermodynamics, fluids, etc, to speedy compiled languages. The output is immediately verifiable with a bit of trial and error and visualization and you’re saved literally months of up front text book and white paper research to start prototyping anything

Re: AI was supposed to help juniors shine. Why does it mostly make seniors stronger?

#153

Post by glouwbug »

DarkNova6 wrote: post #117
celticninja wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A junior would see the solution works and create a PR. A senior knows it works, why it works and what can be improved, then they open a PR. AI is great at a first draft of anything, code, images, text, but the real skill is turning that first draft into something good.

I don't see this a problem of seniority but one of mindset. I've met enough "senior devs" that will push just about anything and curious juniors that are much more selective about their working process.

In the age of high interest rates everyone is pushing quantity over quality

Re: AI was supposed to help juniors shine. Why does it mostly make seniors stronger?

#154

Post by jaggederest »

ay wrote: post #137
raincole wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At least you can ask AI to summarize a AGENT.md or something and it will read it diligently next time. As for humans, they might not have the motivation technical writing skill to document what they learnt. And even if they did, the next person might not have the patience to actually read it.

"Read diligently" - that’s a very optimistic statement. I can not count how many times Claude (LLM I am most familiar with, I had it write probably about 100KLOC in the past few months) explicitly disobeyed what was written in the instructions. Also, a good few times, if it were a human doing the task, I would have said they both failed to follow the instructions and lied about it and attempted to pretend they didn’t…

Claude has really gone downhill in the last month or so. They made a change to move the CLAUDE.md from the system prompt to being occasionally read in, and it really deprioritizes the instructions to the same attention level as the code it's working on.

I've been trying out Codex the last couple days and it's much more adherent and much less prone to lying and laziness. Anthropic says they're working on a significant release in Claude Code, but I'd much rather have them just revert back to the system as it was ~a month ago.

Re: AI was supposed to help juniors shine. Why does it mostly make seniors stronger?

#155

Post by mrits »

ants_everywhere wrote: post #148
Hendrikto wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I could have written it but it would have taken me about 3x longer when all is said and done. Really does not sound like that from your description. It sounds like coaching a noob, which is a lot of work in itself. Wasn’t there a study that said that using LLMs makes people feel more productive while they actually are not?

There was one study that said that in a specific setting and was amplified heavily on forums by anti-AI people. There have been many more studies showing productivity gains across a variety of tasks that preceded that one. That study wasn't necessarily wrong about the specific methodology they had for onboarding people to use AI. But if I remember correctly it was funded by an organization that was slightly skeptical…

I don't understand why anyone would believe a study on anything AI at this point. I don't believe anyone can quantify software development productivity much less measure the impact from AI

Re: AI was supposed to help juniors shine. Why does it mostly make seniors stronger?

#158

Post by CuriouslyC »

jaggederest wrote: post #154
ay wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Read diligently" - that’s a very optimistic statement. I can not count how many times Claude (LLM I am most familiar with, I had it write probably about 100KLOC in the past few months) explicitly disobeyed what was written in the instructions. Also, a good few times, if it were a human doing the task, I would have said they both failed to follow the instructions and lied about it and attempted to pretend they didn’t…

Claude has really gone downhill in the last month or so. They made a change to move the CLAUDE.md from the system prompt to being occasionally read in, and it really deprioritizes the instructions to the same attention level as the code it's working on. I've been trying out Codex the last couple days and it's much more adherent and much less prone to lying and laziness. Anthropic says they're working on a significant…

Claude is cooked. GPT5 codex is a much stronger model, and the codex cli is much more performant/robust than cc (even if it has fewer features).

I've never had a model lie to me as much as Claude. It's insane.

Re: AI was supposed to help juniors shine. Why does it mostly make seniors stronger?

#159

Post by cratermoon »

AI was supposed to help juniors shine? I don't remember hearing that anywhere. AI was supposed to let CEOs fire expensive experts and replace them with whatever slop the computer extruded from the manager's prompt. There was never any significant hype about making juniors into experts.

Re: AI was supposed to help juniors shine. Why does it mostly make seniors stronger?

#160

Post by lostintheweeds »

It's a code/text generator not a pair programmer - not that different from past code generators which were always designed by seniors who knew what the end results should look like, and used by juniors to make them more productive and less error prone. Sure a junior can vibe code... something... but do they know what they want at the outset or do they know when things are going off the rails and a step back is needed? It's easy to get lost way out in the weeds if you can't check your (experience) compass every now and then.
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