Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Revenge of the Junior Developer

sourcegraph.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 94 posts

Re: Revenge of the Junior Developer

#31

Post by monsieurbanana »

Even if I would agree with everything the article says, I have no idea how the author gets to the conclusion that junior developers will prevail because they are faster at adopting LLMs.

Didn't he just made a point about how fast the situation is evolving? I had some FOMO about ai last year, not anymore. I don't care that I don't have time to fully explore the current LLM state of the art, because in a month it will be obsolete. I'm happy waiting until it settles down.

And if their scenario ends up happening, and you can basically multiply a dev's productivity by N by paying N x K dollarinos, why would you chose a junior dev? It's cheaper, but sometimes a junior dev doesn't take longer to arrive at a solution, it never does (same for senior devs, don't get me wrong, but it happens less often).

Re: Revenge of the Junior Developer

#32

Post by skydhash »

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…

Usually my own way of working is to use Balsamiq[0] to have a visual prototype to test out flows, Figma|Sketch for the UI specs, then to just code it. Kinda the same when drawing where you just doodle until you have a few workable ideas, iterate of these to judge colors and other things, and then commit to one for the final result.

[0]: https://balsamiq.com/

Re: Revenge of the Junior Developer

#34

Post by jdlshore »

glitchc wrote: post #23
LightHugger wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Huh. While I agree that Bitcoin specifically has been a successful speculative investment in the past, "a safe store of value" is a massive stretch. It's a safe store of value in the same way a S&P 500 index fund is, except more volatile. What's that phrase... "Past performance is not indicative of future gains?"

Re: Revenge of the Junior Developer

#35

Post by bayindirh »

null_name wrote: post #28
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.

I remembered the dialogue from the movie Snatch:

    T: What's happening with this sausages, Charlie?
    C: 2 minutes, Turkish.
    -- 5 Minutes later ---
    T: How long for the sausages?
    C: 5 minutes, Turkish.
    T: It was 2 minutes, 5 minutes ago.
I don't know why I remembered it. Is it AI, or self driving cars, or both. Huh.

Re: Revenge of the Junior Developer

#36

Post by jdlshore »

skydhash wrote: post #24
wrs wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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/

They typically generate generic LALR parsers, not custom recursive descent parsers. I'm no expert, but my understanding is that custom recursive descent parsers have advantages in terms of readability and error message generation.

Re: Revenge of the Junior Developer

#37

Post by myko »

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’…

I find myself much the opposite - I don't usually complain about hype cycles, thinking we should wait and see before reserving judgement. In this case I feel like we've seen enough to know LLMs are not capable of performing anyone's job.

Re: Revenge of the Junior Developer

#38

Post by jcgrillo »

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.

> We’re talking about each developer gradually boosting their productivity by a multiplier of ~5x by Q4 2025 (allowing for ramp-up time), for an additional amortized cost of only maybe $50k/year the first year. Who wouldn’t go for that deal?

OK, I'll take the other side of that bet. If in Q4 '25 devs using cursor or whatever are 5x as productive as me using emacs, I'll give this AI stuff another chance. But I'm pretty sure it won't happen.

Re: Revenge of the Junior Developer

#39

Post by jcgrillo »

bayindirh wrote: post #35
null_name wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I remembered the dialogue from the movie Snatch: T: What's happening with this sausages, Charlie? C: 2 minutes, Turkish. -- 5 Minutes later --- T: How long for the sausages? C: 5 minutes, Turkish. T: It was 2 minutes, 5 minutes ago. I don't know why I remembered it. Is it AI, or self driving cars, or both. Huh.

Don't forget the electric air taxis!

Re: Revenge of the Junior Developer

#40

Post by DanHulton »

As always, citation needed.

(Also, grain of salt required, because this is a blatant marketing post.)

Look, I've been hearing "the models will get better and make these core problems go away" since it become common to talk about "the models" at all. Maybe they will some day! But also, and critically, maybe they won't.

You also have to consider the future where some companies spend an additional $50-100k per developer and they DON'T see any of this supposed increase in performance, if these "trust me, it'll happen this time" promises don't come true. This is the kind of bet that can CRATER companies, so it's not surprising to see some hesitation here, a desire to see if the football will be again yanked away.

Plus, and I believe most damningly, this article appears to be engaging in the classic technocratic failure mode: mistaking social problems for technical ones.

Obviously, yes, developers engage in solving technical problems, but that is not all they do, and at the higher level, that becomes the least of what they do. More and more, a good developer ensures that they are solving the RIGHT problem in the RIGHT WAY. They're consulting with managers, (ideally) users, other teams, a whole host of people to ensure the right thing is built at the right time with the right features and that the right sacrifices are being made. LLMs are classically bad at this.

The author dismissively calls this "getting stuck", and handwaves the importance of it away, saying that the engineer will be able to unstuck the model at first (which, if we're putting armies of "vibe coding" junior engineers in charge of the LLMS, who've not had time enough in their career to develop this skill, HOW?), and then makes the classic claim "but the models will get better", and predicts the models will eventually be able to do it (which, if this is an intractable problem with LLMS -- and so far evidence has been leaning this way -- again, HOW?).

Forgive that apalling grammar. I am het up. But note well what I'm doing: I'm asking "should we even be doing this?" Which is something these models a) will have to do well to accomplish what the author insinuates they will, and b) have been persistently terrible at.

I'm going to remain skeptical for now, since it seems that's my one remaining superpower versus these LLMs, and I guess I'm going to need to keep that skill sharp if I want to avoid the breadline in this author's future. =)

Post reply on HN