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

elma.dev

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

#281

Post by sarchertech »

athrowaway3z wrote: post #134
Hendrikto wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I could have written it but it would have taken me about 3x longer when all is said and done. Really does not sound like that from your description. It sounds like coaching a noob, which is a lot of work in itself. Wasn’t there a study that said that using LLMs makes people feel more productive while they actually are not?

> Wasn’t there a study that said that using LLMs makes people feel more productive while they actually are not? On a tangent; that study is brought up a lot. There are some issues with it, but I agree with the main takeaway to be weary of the feeling of productivity vs actual productivity. But most of the time its brought up by AI skeptics, that conveniently gloss over the fact it's about averages. Which, while organ…

The key insight from the study is that even the users that did see an increase in productivity overestimated that increase.

Taken along with the dozens of other studies that show that humans are terrible at estimating how long it will take them to complete task, you should be very skeptical when someone says an LLM makes them x% more productive.

There’s no reason to think that the most skillful LLM users are not overestimating productivity benefits as well.

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

#282

Post by vivzkestrel »

tjansen wrote: post #69

These days, AI can do much more than "Cranking out boilerplate and scaffolding, Automating repetitive routines". That was last year. With the right instructions, Claude Sonnet 4 can easily write over 99% of most business applications. You need to be specific in your instructions, though. Like "implement this table, add these fields, look at this and this implementation for reference, don't forget to do this and consi…

my dear guy, where is the shovelware https://mikelovesrobots.substack.com/p/wheres-the-shovelware... Where's the Shovelware? Why AI Coding Claims Don't Add Up

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

#283

Post by dawnerd »

bigfishrunning wrote: post #223
victorbjorklund wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

100% this. The AI missunderstands and make a mistake? No problem. Clarify and the AI will come back with a rewrite in 30 sec.

A rewrite with another, more subtle mistake. That you must spend energy discovering and diagnosing.

And potentially trick you into going down a rabbit hole as you try to steer it when it would have been faster to edit the code yourself. The best use is editing code with it instead of purely relying on prompting. Also new contexts for different changes make a huge difference. Seems a lot of devs get stuck in the single context chat stream and it starts to break down as context gets fuzzy.

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

#284

Post by ljm »

aeternum wrote: post #274
reactordev wrote: post #266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Mentorship is unfortunately broken because gone are the days of apprenticeships. If you find a great mentor, do everything you can to learn quickly then jump ship to big tech and cash in.

A great mentor won’t waste their time on someone cynically using their time to cash out at Meta. Such a person can just get a CS degree and launch into Amazon for that.

Big Tech are just the IT enterprises of the modern day. It’s not where the action is and that experience is not so hot on the CV when it comes to early stage development.

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

#285

Post by pjmlp »

aeternum wrote: post #274
reactordev wrote: post #266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Mentorship is unfortunately broken because gone are the days of apprenticeships. If you find a great mentor, do everything you can to learn quickly then jump ship to big tech and cash in.

Depends on the country, they are pretty much alive across many European countries.

Here are two examples,

A German site to search for technical schools with apprenticeship,

https://www.ausbildung.de/

The same for Portugal

https://www.escolasprofissionais.com/

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

#286

Post by kromokromo »

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…

I think a lot of the problems lies in their prompting. AI is usually at its worst when just saying «deploy terraform module». And off it goes spitting out code.

What they should have done as juniors was to have a conversation about the topic and task first. «Help me understand …» learning and planning is especially important with LLM coding.

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

#287

Post by TeMPOraL »

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.

Mentoring is a different kind of work than coding. Like senior+ level in some companies, it's just faux management - people work, with all the expectations and responsibilities of the non-technical track, but none of the status and privileges.

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

#288

Post by sokoloff »

bigfishrunning wrote: post #252
square_usual wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> another, more subtle mistake. That you must spend energy discovering and diagnosing But this is literally what senior engineers do most of the time? Have juniors write code with direction and review that it isn't buggy?

Except that most of the code seniors review was written with intention, not just the most statistically most likely response to a given query. As a senior engineer, the kinds of mistakes that AI makes are much more bizarre then the mistakes junior engineers make

I’ve definitely seen absolutely bizarre creations from junior devs decades ago (so, well before modern AI). I can also think back to some cringey code I wrote by hand when I was a junior as well.

I mentor high-school students and watch them live write code that takes a completely bizarre path. It might technically be intentional, but that doesn’t mean it’s good or useful.

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

#290

Post by Joel_Mckay »

This articles assertions are demonstrably false.

1. Several papers showed a 23% drop in productivity, and an incorrect belief of 20% performance improvement by the same individuals.

2. Studies showed LLMs made zero improvement in senior coders performance. Note senior coders are usually mostly a self-aware LaTeX macro already.

LLM AstroTurf only works on people that can't be arsed to lookup the obvious spam hallucinations. lol =3

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