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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?

#261

Post by pessimizer »

exe34 wrote: post #211
fluidcruft wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

True but the n00b is very fast. A lot of coaching is waiting for the n00b to perform tasks and meta things about motivation. These LLM are extremely fast and eager to work. I don't need a study to tell me that five projects that have been stuck in slow plodding along waiting for me to ever have time or resources for nearly ten years. But these are now nearing completion after only two months of picking up Claude Code…

> I don't need a study to tell me that five projects that have been stuck in slow plodding along waiting for me to ever have time or resources for nearly ten years. that's the issue in the argument though. it could be that those projects would also have been completed in the same time if you had simply started working on them. but honestly, if it makes you feel productive to the point you're doing more work than you…

You've added an implicit assumption that this person spends more time programming now than they used to, rather than continuing to commit time at the same rate but now leading to projects being completed when they previously got bogged down and abandoned.

There are any number of things you could add to get you to any conclusion. Better to discuss what is there.

I've had the same experience of being able to finish tons of old abandoned projects with AI assistance, and I am not spending any more time than usual working on programming or design projects. It's just that the most boring things that would have taken weeks to figure out and do (instead, let me switch to the other project I have that is not like that, yet) have been reduced to hours. The parts that were tough in a creative fun way are still tough, and AI barely helps with them because it is extremely stupid, but those are the funnest, most substantive parts.

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

#262

Post by WalterSear »

omneity wrote: post #84

I think it’s an expectation issue. AI does make juniors better _at junior tasks_. They now have a pair programmer who can explain difficult concepts, co-ideate and brainstorm, help sift through documentation faster and identify problems more easily. The illusion everybody is tripping on is to think AI can make juniors better at senior tasks.

I think you've hit on half the actual issue.

The other half is that a properly guided AI is exponentially faster at junior tasks than a junior engineer. So much so that it's no longer in anyone but the junior engineer's interest to hand off work to them.

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

#263

Post by dotancohen »

cmiles74 wrote: post #216
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…

I can see how this workflow made the senior developer faster. At the same time, work mentoring the AI strikes me as less valuable then the same time spent mentoring a junior developer. If this ends up encouraging an ever widening gap between the skill levels of juniors and seniors, I think that would be bad for the field, overall. Getting that kind of data is difficult, right now it's just something I worry about.

The junior could use the LLM as a crutch to learn what to learn. Whatever output the LLM gave them, they could examine or ask the LLM to explain. Don't put into production anything you don't understand.

Though I'm extremely well versed in Python, I'm right now writing a Python Qt application with Claude. Every single Qt function or object that I use, I read the documentation for.

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

#264

Post by risyachka »

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…

>> llms where supposed to help juniors

Lol what Who came up with this? They never were supposed to do anything. Just turned out to be useful in experienced hands as expected

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

#265

Post by peteforde »

vlovich123 wrote: post #205
peteforde wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am so tired of this style of "don't believe your lying eyes" conjecture. I'm a career coder and I used LLMs primarily to rapidly produce code for domains that I don't have deep experience in. Instead of spending days or weeks getting up to speed on an SDK I might need once, I have a pair programmer that doesn't check their phone or need to pick up their kids at 4:30pm. If you don't want to use LLMs, nobody is forci…

Correct. In areas you yourself are a junior engineer, you’ll be more effective with an LLM at tackling that area maybe. It’s also surprisingly effective at executing refactors.

I'm not sure which one of us is ultimately more hung up on titles in this context, but I would push back and say that when someone with 30+ years experience tackling software problems delegates navigating the details of an API to an LLM, that is roughly the most "senior developer" moment of the day.

Conflating experience and instinct with knowing everything isn't just false equivalency, it's backwards.

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

#266

Post by reactordev »

shaky-carrousel wrote: post #259
kaydub wrote: post #233

Because juniors don't know when they're being taken down a rabbit hole. So they'll let the LLM go too deep in its hallucinations. I have a Jr that was supposed to deploy a terraform module I built. This task has been hanging out for a while so I went to check in on them. They told me the problem they're having and asked me to take a look. Their repo is a disaster, it's very obvious claude took them down a rabbit hole…

Unfortunately, the type of work you hate doing is perfect for a junior. Easy tasks to get a hold on the system.

Yup, sounds like a great opportunity to show you’re senior by mentoring.

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

#267

Post by pessimizer »

fritzo wrote: post #246
dgs_sgd wrote: post #220

The article says that more juniors + AI was the early narrative, but where does that come from? Everything I’ve read has been the opposite. I thought people from the beginning saw that AI would amplify a senior’s skills and leave less opportunities for juniors.

No code, low code, vibe code. The narrative outside tech circles is "empowering creators"

It's funny, but what I think is could do is empower creators to hire better programmers and to express their intentions better to programmers.

This will require that they read and attempt to understand the output, though, after they type their intentions in. It will also need the chatbots to stop insisting that they can do the things they can't really do, and instead to teach the "creators" what computers can do, and which people are good at it.

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

#268

Post by morkalork »

shaky-carrousel wrote: post #259
kaydub wrote: post #233

Because juniors don't know when they're being taken down a rabbit hole. So they'll let the LLM go too deep in its hallucinations. I have a Jr that was supposed to deploy a terraform module I built. This task has been hanging out for a while so I went to check in on them. They told me the problem they're having and asked me to take a look. Their repo is a disaster, it's very obvious claude took them down a rabbit hole…

Unfortunately, the type of work you hate doing is perfect for a junior. Easy tasks to get a hold on the system.

>How'd you get so good at debugging and navigating code you've never seen before?

>Because I spent a couple internships and a whole year as a junior debugging, triaging and patching every single issue reported by other developers and the QA team

Was I jealous that the full time and senior devs got to do all the feature work and architecture design? Yes. Am I a better developer having done that grind? Also yes.

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

#269

Post by bayarearefugee »

reactordev wrote: post #266
shaky-carrousel wrote: post #259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unfortunately, the type of work you hate doing is perfect for a junior. Easy tasks to get a hold on the system.

Yup, sounds like a great opportunity to show you’re senior by mentoring.

Which will (sadly) offer you zero extrinsic benefit at almost every job, and will often actually count against you as a waste of time relative to the vast majority of productivity metrics that companies actually use.

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

#270

Post by andrewgleave »

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…

Yes. Juniors have a lack of knowledge about how to build coherent mental models of problems whose solution will ultimately be implemented in code, whereas seasoned engineers do.

Seniors can make this explicit to models and use them to automate "the code they would have written," whereas a junior doesn’t know what they would have written nor how they would have solved it absent a LLM.

Same applies to all fields: LLMs can be either huge leverage on top of existing knowledge or a crutch for a lack of understanding.

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