21–30 of 138 posts
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.
God knows what he thought about me
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.
Market forces will take care of it. These people won't get hired or last long if they do. Companies don't need programmers whose only skill is prompt "engineering".
That philosophy never died and will probably keep living on eternally, perhaps until it somedays becomes a realistic option, who knows ?
Many companies see it as the utopia, and won't have any strong rejection of programmers sharing that ideal.
This article is just the latest in the long history of lamenting the laziness of the youth
AI struggles with knowledge from after its training date (so it can't help very well for anything relating to new versions of libraries) and often just generally gets things wrong or comes up with suboptimal answers. It's still only optimized to create answers that look correct, after all.
With these problems, someone on the team still needs to understand or be able to figure out what's going on. And dangit if it isn't getting hard to hire for that.
And the day that AI can actually replace the work of junior devs is just going to cause more complications for the software industry. Who will get the experience to become senior devs? Who will direct them? And even if those people also get replaced eventually, we will still probably have more awkward inbetween times with their own problems.
Can't say it's not convenient, but no use pretending the challenges don't exist.
The implication that Stack Overflow was somehow the only way you'd ever find a solution to a gnarly problem (back in the day) seems weird to me. I mean before that (even during that) there was the alternative problem solving technique of, well, rolling up your sleeves getting stuck in and figuring out the problem yourself without asking anybody. By doing some reading. Or by reading source code. Or disassembling code…
This article is just the latest in the long history of lamenting the laziness of the youth
While a trope, it is also statistically proven that the youth of this generation are doing worse, by almost every metric, than prior generations; including but not limited to achieving adult milestones years later than normal, record high percentages of medication distribution, and (for what it’s worth) a historically low percentage of young people that could even enter the military if they wanted to, at just 1 in 7.
"This is the worst code I've ever run."
"But it does run."
> I recently realized that there’s a whole generation of new programmers who don’t even know what StackOverflow is.
I also did not know about stack overflow when I started programming. Or even when I finished college and entered the workforce.
Because it didn't exist yet.
> Back when “Claude” was not a chatbot but the man who invented the field of information entropy, there was a different way to debug programming problems.
First, search on Google.
Google also did not exist until '98. By which point I'd already learned enough c++ from a physical book to write toys like a space invaders kind of game.
> Junior devs these days have it easy. They just go to chat.com and copy-paste whatever errors they see.
Juniors blindly copying code from StackOverflow used to be a standard complaint.
This article is just the latest in the long history of lamenting the laziness of the youth
Please don't forget to tell us about them in great detail, Socrates and all that. After all that supposed counter-argument to anything and everything only gets brought up every single time when anyone suggests something got worse.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don’t think so. Being lazy and never developing foundational knowledge is different. New devs are expected to have experience using AI coding tools. If they’re expected to have that, why wouldn’t they trust it? If you trust a code generator, why dig deeper?
People said similar things when C compilers became decent. Turns out that we still have people who know how to write good code, even good assembly code.
there’s a direct relationship to C code and the resulting assembly.
The C language was specifically designed so that language constructs were converted into the intended assembly anyway.
C didn’t obfuscate the problem of writing code, just allowed us to operate at a higher, but still sound, level.
LLMs are not an abstraction like C. You aren’t going through a sound, tractable process going from natural language to code.
You’re going through a black box.
It’s no longer a new abstraction on top of a fundamental idea.
There is no understanding of anything being developed. Prompts aren’t even deterministic wrt the output of the LLM, so even how to prompt a given model isn’t something that can be understood or totally predicted. It’s just like SEO hacks.