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Revenge of the Junior Developer

sourcegraph.com

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Re: Revenge of the Junior Developer

#21

Post by hombre_fatal »

LoganDark wrote: post #8
nickysielicki wrote: post #6

I’m usually one of the people complaining about hype cycles, and it’s usually been correct to be pessimistic about them. But in this particular case I have to think a lot of people just haven’t tried it in its best form. No, not a local model on your MacBook. No, not the web interface on the free plan. Go lay down $300 into API credits, spend a weekend (or maybe two) fully setting up aider, really give it a shot. It’…

$300? That much sounds like it would last a year. You don't need to spend anywhere near $300 just to try things out

I burned through $50 credits in a sitting the first time I used Claude Code to see what I could vibe-code from scratch. You're pushing whole files of tokens through it every time you interact with it.

Re: Revenge of the Junior Developer

#22

Post by LPisGood »

wrs wrote: post #15
skydhash wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe there's a different universe out there, where the code you write is not expected to work, so you can poke the LLM for a whole day to see if it barfs something out. I spend much of the day reading and thinking and only a small portion actually writing code, because when I'm typing, I usually have a hypothetical solution that is 99% correct and I'm just bringing it to life. Or I'm refactoring. You can interrupt m…

I agree with the spirit of the argument, but I don’t think you’re taking into account the scale of “typing” we’re talking about now. For example, yesterday I needed a parser for a mini-language. I wrote a grammar — actually not even the formal grammar, just some examples — and what I wanted the AST to look like. I said “write the tokenizer”, and it did. I told it to tweak a few things and write tests. It did. I told…

This is a cool use case that probably saved you some time, but writing a recursive descent parser is something freshman CS students do for a lab assignment.

It isn’t exactly breaking new ground or doing anything you couldn’t find with a quick google search.

Re: Revenge of the Junior Developer

#23

Post by glitchc »

LightHugger wrote: post #19
tyleo wrote: post #5

I love how new technology becomes like religion. It develops both cult followers and critics. In that lens think the AI cult is more right than the Crypto cult. At least I can use it to do something tangible right now while crypto is still pretty useless after many years. In some sense I think these technologies need the cults and the critics though. It’s good to have people push new things forwards even if everyone…

Cryptocurrency allows people who are otherwise limited by draconian payment platform limitations, puritanical moralists who own credit card companies and such to buy and sell things online without being stopped. It's obviously not a good system but it provides a high effort release valve, a fallback mechanism that hopefully will undermine some of these draconian measures. Lots of people have been helped by the existe…

Evidence suggests it's the exact opposite. The only thing crypto has really been good for is a store of value. Sure, it's a volatile commodity, but over any 5 year average window, Bitcoin definitely beats inflation. That makes it a safe store of value.

Re: Revenge of the Junior Developer

#24

Post by skydhash »

wrs wrote: post #15
skydhash wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe there's a different universe out there, where the code you write is not expected to work, so you can poke the LLM for a whole day to see if it barfs something out. I spend much of the day reading and thinking and only a small portion actually writing code, because when I'm typing, I usually have a hypothetical solution that is 99% correct and I'm just bringing it to life. Or I'm refactoring. You can interrupt m…

I agree with the spirit of the argument, but I don’t think you’re taking into account the scale of “typing” we’re talking about now. For example, yesterday I needed a parser for a mini-language. I wrote a grammar — actually not even the formal grammar, just some examples — and what I wanted the AST to look like. I said “write the tokenizer”, and it did. I told it to tweak a few things and write tests. It did. I told…

Isn't that what tools like antlr [0], bison[1] do?

[0]: https://www.antlr.org/

[1]: https://www.gnu.org/software/bison/

Re: Revenge of the Junior Developer

#25

Post by haburka »

One of the funniest things I’ve read in a while. Also full of some truths. I think learning how to use AI will become a core part of being a dev but I seriously doubt they’ll have anywhere near the competency of solving a problem that a junior engineer has. They can certainly write code like one though.

I really recommend this to anyone reading - if you haven’t tried using cursor or copilot, check them out. It makes writing code less tedious.

Re: Revenge of the Junior Developer

#26

Post by aorloff »

tyleo wrote: post #5

I love how new technology becomes like religion. It develops both cult followers and critics. In that lens think the AI cult is more right than the Crypto cult. At least I can use it to do something tangible right now while crypto is still pretty useless after many years. In some sense I think these technologies need the cults and the critics though. It’s good to have people push new things forwards even if everyone…

Crypto is still pretty valuable relative to how useless it remains.

Unless you are imagining a world in which there's a global conflict and crypto isn't shut down in the first 12 months.

Re: Revenge of the Junior Developer

#28

Post by null_name »

disambiguation wrote: post #12

Everyone: telling me how great AI is. No one: making anything great with AI. Sourcegraph: an AI company, routinely promoting their LLM-optimism blogposts to HN, perpetuating the hype cycle their business model depends on.

This sapling is twice as large as it was a week ago, which was twice again as large as it was the week before. Why, at this rate, it'll be bigger than the whole world in but a month.

Re: Revenge of the Junior Developer

#29

Post by throwaway173738 »

disambiguation wrote: post #12

Everyone: telling me how great AI is. No one: making anything great with AI. Sourcegraph: an AI company, routinely promoting their LLM-optimism blogposts to HN, perpetuating the hype cycle their business model depends on.

Oh good. When I saw the graph I started wondering what I was being sold.

Re: Revenge of the Junior Developer

#30

Post by hombre_fatal »

danielbln wrote: post #20
skydhash wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe there's a different universe out there, where the code you write is not expected to work, so you can poke the LLM for a whole day to see if it barfs something out. I spend much of the day reading and thinking and only a small portion actually writing code, because when I'm typing, I usually have a hypothetical solution that is 99% correct and I'm just bringing it to life. Or I'm refactoring. You can interrupt m…

I disagree, agentic coding is amazing for prototyping. It removes a ton of friction and inertia and allows me to try a bunch of ideas to see what works (from a delivery and/or UX perspective). Of course, you should have the systems thinking and experience in place to know what it is you're doing with it at any given point , but for demos and prototypes it has been an absolute boon. Generally, you wouldn't type out th…

A good example of this at the extreme is game design.

When you're making a game, it's really expensive to try out different ideas, like a few different implementations of a mechanic. It could be hours of work to make a change. You tend to have to do a lot of thinking to tweak a mechanic in a fundamental way just to see what it feels like, knowing that you're probably going to throw it away.

LLMs are really good at this. Make a git branch, ask Claude Code to tweak the physics so that it does X, see what it feels like. Rollback the change or continue tweaking.

Same with branching the UI to see what a different idea would feel like. Simple changes to explain could result in hours of refactoring UI code (chore work) just to see if you like the result. Or just ask the LLM to do it, see what it feels like, roll it back.

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