The Death of the Junior Developer • Hacker News Board

Re: The Death of the Junior Developer

#21

Post by menacingly » Tue, Jun 25, 2024, 3:31 AM UTC

You're only allowed to believe LLMs are a kind of digital messiah or that they're complete hype garbage, when of course the answer is some point between.

There is obviously a lot of potential here, but there is also a lot of solution looking for a problem.

My current red flag is if an argument hinges on a trademark breathless frisson for the growth potential. Statements like "models are getting smarter every month" that hasn't been true for a year. If your excitement over AI is based not on what we can do today, but a presumed future expansion for which we have no evidence, that's silly.

But what they can do today is cool. We worked for a long time to get computers to understand natural language intent, and LLMs demonstrably solve this problem.

Re: The Death of the Junior Developer

#22

Post by llIIllIIllIIl » Tue, Jun 25, 2024, 3:32 AM UTC

Well, it’s difficult to study books to become senior developer. You have to participate in, experience the problems and solutions, at the end it’s still people that are working with you. Ai assistant is another tool in the box.

Imagine the engineer going oncall for the code this mediocrity generation tool produced. Are they gonna reason with chatgpt “why the duck did you write it this way?” or are they gonna zoom the person whose name git shows on commit during the incident?

The tool is getting better every day, although it will not replace the operator.

Re: The Death of the Junior Developer

#23

Post by [deleted] » Tue, Jun 25, 2024, 3:33 AM UTC

josephmosby wrote: post #18

This has happened before. From 2000-2004, this was the world. Companies were going out of business or cutting headcount to the bone, and the folks with 7+ years of experience were getting picked up (often at a discount). If you started your first job coding in 1999 and then got laid off half a year later, sucks for you. 2004 both Salesforce, Google, and Blackboard (they were big then!) IPO, and Facebook comes screami…

[deleted]

Re: The Death of the Junior Developer

#24

Post by rkunal » Tue, Jun 25, 2024, 3:36 AM UTC

Using LLM is so tiring. If I wanted to chat all day, I would be an extrovert.

I have a genuine query. Are any software engineers getting sane code out of LLM ?

I struggle to conjure good unity or kotlin code from both paid and self hosted solutions.

Re: The Death of the Junior Developer

#25

Post by wavemode » Tue, Jun 25, 2024, 3:44 AM UTC

rkunal wrote: post #24

Using LLM is so tiring. If I wanted to chat all day, I would be an extrovert. I have a genuine query. Are any software engineers getting sane code out of LLM ? I struggle to conjure good unity or kotlin code from both paid and self hosted solutions.

I use AI autocomplete (copilot-type plugins).

I could never imagine copy-pasting back and forth with an AI in a chat window. At that point I'd just Google the docs and write the code myself.

Re: The Death of the Junior Developer

#26

Post by migf » Tue, Jun 25, 2024, 3:47 AM UTC

As a senior I'm really not feeling any FOMO here. If the tools are going to get better and better, is there any need to be an early adopter, or build expertise in using them?

Re: The Death of the Junior Developer

#27

Post by verdverm » Tue, Jun 25, 2024, 3:48 AM UTC

rkunal wrote: post #24

Using LLM is so tiring. If I wanted to chat all day, I would be an extrovert. I have a genuine query. Are any software engineers getting sane code out of LLM ? I struggle to conjure good unity or kotlin code from both paid and self hosted solutions.

LLMs can often stitch together information from blogs and stack overflow like sites. You can view it as a better way to search and find answers to your development roadblocks, instead of something that writes code for you. This is where I get value worth paying for, by saving me time of having to navigate multiple search results and piece things together. Many times it is a mix of the two and the LLM, as a starting point, gives me better leads

Re: The Death of the Junior Developer

#28

Post by wavemode » Tue, Jun 25, 2024, 3:50 AM UTC

Yes, junior developers submit bad code sometimes. And they will at times be led astray by LLMs.

But... that's what code review is for. Has the author of this article never heard of the concept?

Re: The Death of the Junior Developer

#29

Post by rkunal » Tue, Jun 25, 2024, 3:54 AM UTC

wavemode wrote: post #25

rkunal wrote: post #24

Using LLM is so tiring. If I wanted to chat all day, I would be an extrovert. I have a genuine query. Are any software engineers getting sane code out of LLM ? I struggle to conjure good unity or kotlin code from both paid and self hosted solutions.

I use AI autocomplete (copilot-type plugins). I could never imagine copy-pasting back and forth with an AI in a chat window. At that point I'd just Google the docs and write the code myself.

Which specific plugin and LLM ?

Re: The Death of the Junior Developer

#30

Post by presidentender » Tue, Jun 25, 2024, 3:59 AM UTC

JohnMakin wrote: post #4

basically this is a lot of seemingly AI-generated drivel directly related to driving you to Cody, whatever their thing they are trying to sell with this click baity headline is doing. I could not find anything of substance in this article, and was disappointed, because I feel this is a topic in dire need of discussion.

It would surprise me to learn that Steve Yegge had deferred the opportunity to type a lot in favor of using an LLM to generate natural language.

I'm biased in his favor, but I recognize that brevity is not among his virtues.