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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?

#291

Post by victor9000 »

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 don't know, claude did that

I'm the type of reviewer that actually reads code and asks probing questions, and I've heard this from junior and senior devs alike. It's maddening how people say this with a straight face and expect to keep their jobs. If people are pushing code they don't understand, they're liability to their team, product, and employer.

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

#292

Post by dragonwriter »

The skills juniors have at any time are more narrow and more focussed on the tasks that are most simple in the current context; new tools that change things inherently are most immediately beneficial to people with broader and deeper skill sets, since they shake up the assumptions on which initial (and thus, junior-level) skill acquisition is based.

But skill acquisition patterns change as the context changes, so juniors end up benefitting, too, but the effect is delayed for them.

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

#293

Post by throwaway0123_5 »

> The early narrative was that companies would need fewer seniors, and juniors together with AI could produce quality code.

I don't remember this being the narrative at all. Almost as soon as LLMs could produce useful code the narrative I was hearing among devs was "Seniors + LLMs means you'll need less juniors."

And the narrative from companies (sometimes requiring the smallest amount of reading between the lines) is "You'll need less human employees, period."

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

#294

Post by boringg »

victor9000 wrote: post #291
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 don't know, claude did that I'm the type of reviewer that actually reads code and asks probing questions, and I've heard this from junior and senior devs alike. It's maddening how people say this with a straight face and expect to keep their jobs. If people are pushing code they don't understand, they're liability to their team, product, and employer.

It is going to happen with higher frequency - buckle up!

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

#295

Post by lolive »

Dumblydorr wrote: post #151
lolive wrote: post #12

I read, ages ago, this apocryphal quote by William Gibson: “The most important skill of the 21st century is to figure out which proper keywords to type in the Google search bar, to display the proper answers.” To me, that has never been more true. Most junior dev ask GeminiPiTi to write the JavaScript code for them, whereas I ask it for explanation on the underlying model of async/await and the execution model of a J…

The true path in Piano isn’t learning tricks. You start with the most basic pieces and work step by step up to harder ones. That’s how everyone I know has done in it my 26 years of playing. Tricks cheapens the actual music. Chopin has beginners pieces too, many in our piano studio were first year pianists doing rain drop prelude, e minor prelude, or other beginner works like Bach.

I was unhappy with [the briefness of] my piano metaphor. Thanks for elaborating.

But my important point in it was the « identify and name » the elements of your problem [piece of music, or whatever]

Learning process has usually been, as you mention, to follow the path first, then eventually you can name things afterwards. Which is a highly uncomfortable process.

Another path that AI might force us to follow is to quick-identifyAndName the proper concepts, ahead of practical experience.

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

#296

Post by vlovich123 »

peteforde wrote: post #265
vlovich123 wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I really don’t know what I said that was such an emotional trigger for you. All I said is that it’s an accelerant for you when you leave your domain. Like for example I’m a systems engineer. I hate coding UIs but with the LLM I can pump out a UI quickly and this was true both for web code and a GUI I built with dioxus. The UI code was also cleaner because I had some sense of how it should be structured and asked the AI to cleanup that structure. But ultimately it did most of the work in response to high level prompts and I picked and chose what to review line by line vs vibe coding.

That’s what I mean - by myself it would have taken me easily 10x longer if not worse because UI coding for me is a slog + there’s nuances about reactive coding + getting started is also a hurdle. The output of the code was still high quality because I knew when the LLM wasn’t making the choices I wanted it to make.

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

#297

Post by catlifeonmars »

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 don't know, claude did that

also likes to blame shop accidents on the table saw

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

#298

Post by Ensorceled »

WalterSear wrote: post #262
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.

This is what I've been finding. Currently, if I have a junior level task, I take the email I would have sent to a junior developer explaining what I want and give it to ChatGPT/Claude/etc and get a reasonably good solution that needs as many feedback loops as the junior dev would have needed. Except I got that solution in a few minutes.

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

#299

Post by catlifeonmars »

dawnerd wrote: post #283
bigfishrunning wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> The best use is editing code with it instead of purely relying on prompting.

What does this look like in practice?

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

#300

Post by bentt »

mattmanser wrote: post #68
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…

Would it have actually taken you 3x longer? I am surprising myself these days with how fast I'm being using AI as a glorified Stack Overflow. We are also having studies and posts come out that when actually tried side-by-side, the AI writes the coding route is slower, though the developer percieves it as faster.

The truth of it is that when I code with an LLM I scope the work up to include parts that would be a stretch for me to implement. I know what I want them to do, I know where I could find the info to write the code, but the LLM can just spit it out and if it's validate-able, then great, on to the next.

If I were to attack the same system myself without any LLM assist, I'd make a lot of choices to optimize for my speed and knowledge base. The code would end up much simpler. For something that would be handed off to another person (including future me) that can be a win. But if the system is self contained then going bigger and fancier in that moment can be a win. It all depends on the exact goals.

All in all, there's a lot of nuance to this stuff and it's probably not really replacing anyone except people who A) aren't that skilled to start with and B) spend more time yelling about how bad AI is than actually digging in and trying stuff.

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