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AI is making junior devs useless

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Re: AI is making junior devs useless

#211

Post by cyberpunk »

pluc wrote: post #42
EGreg wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It isn’t about training anymore. It is about harnesses. Just look at new math proofs that will come out, as one example. Exploration vs Exploitation is a thing in AI but you seem to think that human creativity can’t be surpassed by harnesses and prompts like “generate 100 types of possible…” You’re wrong. What you call creativity is often a manual application of a simple self-prompt that people do. One can have a loo…

There is no "new ideas" with AI. Claiming the opposite is a fundamental misunderstanding of the technology.

I hear this sentiment a lot but it doesn’t ring true for me.

What is an idea really and what’s your definition of new?

If i get a LLM to spit out, I dunno, a deployment system written in haskell that uses bittorrent or something, none of those bits are new, but certainly there will be unique challenges to solve in the code and it’s a new system.

Where is the line for new? Is it in combining old ideas? If not then does any software have “new” ideas? It’s all combinations of processor instructions after all…

Re: AI is making junior devs useless

#212

Post by cyberpunk »

replygirl wrote: post #50
pluc wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is no "new ideas" with AI. Claiming the opposite is a fundamental misunderstanding of the technology.

i don't think all sides of this discussion agree on what a "new idea" is. i am a very creative person but i've never had a truly original thought and i don't know how having one would be possible

It depends on what layer you look at I think, shoulders of giants and all that..

Re: AI is making junior devs useless

#213

Post by koonsolo »

Thanemate wrote: post #24
slibhb wrote: post #2

I think this concern is overblown. AI is an incredible teaching tool. It's probably better for teaching/explaining than for writing code. This will make the next generation of junior devs far more effective than previous generations. Not because they're skipping the fundamentals...because they have a better grasp of the fundamentals due to back-and-forth with infinitely patient AI teachers.

>AI is an incredible teaching tool. As a junior, my top issue is finding valuable learning material that isn't full of poor or outright wrong information. In the best and most generous interpretation of your statement, LLM's simply removed my need to search for the information. That doesn't mean it's not of poor quality or outright wrong.

Here's a tip from an old timer: read the official docs.

I work a lot with juniors, and they all seem to prefer watching video's. But videos in my opinion are a slow way to gain superficial knowledge.

Do it the hard way and read the official docs, it will be your superpower. Go fast over the easy parts, go slow over the hard parts, it's that simple.

Re: AI is making junior devs useless

#214

Post by wazoox »

Root_Denied wrote: post #203
nostrademons wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's interesting that the same dynamic is playing out on a much larger scale with children. A child is far more helpless than a junior engineer - at least a junior engineer can feed themselves, wipe their own butt, avoid destroying the room, and generally keep themselves alive. Everybody wants to offload the cost of raising children to parents, because the economic benefits aren't realized for 25+ years yet the costs…

It's basically a "Tragedy of the Commons" situation across the board.

Sort of. With the salient point that nothing really exists, but the commons. The individual is nothing without the whole society around.

Re: AI is making junior devs useless

#215

Post by dyauspitr »

raw_anon_1111 wrote: post #65
BobbyJo wrote: post #45

Junior devs have always been useless. You used to give them tasks that take them a week or two even though a senior engineer could do it in a couple hours, not because you wanted them to contribute, but because you wanted them to learn to contribute. The same ethos makes sense with AI, it's just that every company is trying to avoid paying that training tax. Why turn a junior into a senior yourself if you can get the…

What’s the importance of then learning to contribute if they will probably jump ship anyway when they get good enough? Your HR department is not going to give them a market rate raise to keep them - see salary compression and inversion. A junior developer just isn’t worth the investment. I have never once told my manager “it would be really nice to have a few junior developers. It would really help us get this projec…

It doesn’t make sense to hire juniors at all other than as a service to society. I haven’t hired a junior in 4 years. The one I hired 4 years ago was because not only did he do reasonably well on the interview but he literally begged me because he trained himself to do it while painting houses so I saw a lot of passion in him.

Re: AI is making junior devs useless

#216

Post by epgui »

somenameforme wrote: post #72
epgui wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While that’s kind of true in some sense, I think there’s an argument to be made for the contrary: that the mechanism for generating new ideas in humans is not quite as special as we would like to think. In other words, creativity in humans is arguably just as derivative as in machines.

I think this can be falsified by just considering the history of humanity. It wasn't that long ago that human language literally did not even exist. And our collective knowledge wasn't all that much more than 'poke him with the pointy end'. Somehow we went from that to putting a man on the Moon, unlocking the secrets of the atom, and more. And if you consider how awful we are at retaining/sharing information and just…

I’m not claiming an LLM is structurally or functionally equivalent to a human brain. I just said that what we call “creativity” is in fact a very derivative thing.

Re: AI is making junior devs useless

#217

Post by borzi »

This is 100% an issue on the side of the senior developers. Imagine saying "these juniors are useless" because you are making them work in assembly, but C has just been released. You are giving them menial work that is no longer required to do by humans. Instead of giving them the task "update these email templates", the norm should be: "create this new service that automates an internal process". They will make mistakes and they will learn - but what they will be doing is going to be very useful and also give them chance to grow the necessary skills for this new era, with the supervision of a senior.

Re: AI is making junior devs useless

#218

Post by daxfohl »

Nah, it makes teams useless. Maybe not quite yet, but soon, one engineer will be able to do a few sprint teams' worth of work, and deliver features orders of magnitude faster than a team working in parallel. Yeah, generally at first this will be seniors only. But before long, a junior will be able to come in and learn to manage one sprint team's worth of work under the guidance of a senior and partnered with a PM, and grow the product from there. Long term, I imagine 90% workforce reduction will be the norm. Just about all software is a rinse and repeat of some other software, not much true innovation, so picking and choosing and implementing some other software's feature into your own will start to become trivial single-day projects from start to finish. Hopefully AI creates some new industries that SWEs can roll into, but I'm feeling more doomer every day.

Re: AI is making junior devs useless

#219

Post by chris1993 »

braebo wrote: post #98
weatherlite wrote: post #49

My nightmare scenario (which might start to materilize) is that our last years in the industry will be becoming prompt monkies / agent "managers" working on codebases we barely understand in such velocity there's no way we can gain real understanding. Whenever something breaks (and it will , a lot) A.I will fix it - or so we'll hope. And the sad thing is - this might work; you'll get more stuff done with fewer people…

At work we build enterprise software with stuff like Kotlin+Spring + multiple NextJS apps + Microservices + Rust CAD engine. I haven’t have written code aside from tweaking stuff here and there in probably 3 or 4 months. Before that I wrote code by hand every day for many years. I’ve found a lot of fun parts of my new workflow that I enjoy. I still miss being fully immersed in a problem deep in the files… and sometim…

Similarly, I started using Claude to add some features to an native app on iOS and Android in early January. That was so successful (tooks days instead of weeks) I started applying it to client work and basically haven't written any substantial code since. A big change from around 40 years of writing code pretty much every day and I'm enjoying the increased velocity from not having to web search for API and CSS syntax details.

My son, working in another dev company, reports the same - he basically hasn't written much actual code for about three months. It's a massive change.

Re: AI is making junior devs useless

#220

Post by guax »

Ai might bring forward the standardisation we never had. If coding dynamics shift enough then all the opinions about libraries and engines and frameworks might get less focused on readability and more on efficiency and easy composition by Ai.

Security gets outsourced to audited layers and Ai does the stupid boring jobs of gluing them together. Some developers become more specialised and niche, some pivot to product, some pivot to other areas.

There are plenty of people who joined software for the payout and hate it. Plenty of people who grown to hate it over time.

I've been enjoying using it to figure out toy projects but paying an API and depending on a service to code is very sour. I really hope hardware specialises and local models become good enough. Gate keeping development on centralised services would be a loss for everyone and ripe for dystopian outcomes.

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