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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?

#301

Post by mystifyingpoi »

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…

Well, there is a big difference between wanting to just play Chopin and wanting to learn piano well enough to play anything on the current level including Chopin. There are people, who can play whole piano pieces mechanically, because they just learned where to position hands and what keys to press at a given time.

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

#302

Post by SOLAR_FIELDS »

thfuran wrote: post #178
Avicebron wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thankfully after many generations of human interactions and complex analysis of group dynamics, we've found a solution. It's called 'don't be an asshole' and 'pay people competitively'. edit: because people are stupid, 'competitively' in this sense isn't some theoretical number pulled from an average, it's 'does this person feel better off financially working with you than others around them who don't work with you,…

The common corporate policy of making it harder to give raises than to increase starting salaries for new hires is insane.

Is it insane? Makes perfect sense. Employee has way less leverage at raise time. It’s all about leverage. It sucks, but that is the reality

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

#303

Post by jayd16 »

Den_VR wrote: post #95
lazide wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except stackoverflow was only occasionally hallucinating entire libraries.

Perhaps asking the machine to do your job for you isn’t as effective asking the machine to help you think like a senior and find the information you need to do the job yourself.

If we're just back to I do the work and use a search engine, why futz with AI?

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

#304

Post by simonw »

dns_snek wrote: post #243
simonw wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here are some from the last few months: AI coding assistant trial: UK public sector findings report: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/ai-coding-assista... - UK government. "GDS ran a trial of AI coding assistants (AICAs) across government from November 2024 to February 2025. [...] Trial participants saved an average of 56 minutes a working day when using AICAs" Human + AI in Accounting: Early Evidence from…

That was a treat to explore. All of those are based on self-assessment surveys or toy problems. The UK report reads: > On average, users reported time savings of 56 minutes per working day [...] It is also possible that survey respondents overestimated time saved due to optimism bias. Yet in conclusion, this self-reported figure is stated as an independently observed fact. When people without ADHD take stimulants the…

Have you seen any studies on this topic that you find credible?

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

#306

Post by jayd16 »

Why are we memory-holing the narrative that AI would help the most junior of all, non-programmers? Why are the comments pretending like this was hyped as a niche tool for senior devs? It most certainly was hyped as a general tool to replace all kinds of skilled work.

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

#307

Post by devmor »

victorbjorklund wrote: post #213
gnerd00 wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

that is absolutely false - the capital and resources used to create these things are societal scale. An individual consumer is not paying that cost at this time.

You can make the same argument about humans. The employeer doesnt pay the full cost and time to create the worker from an embryo to a senior dev.

Unless you are advocating for executing developers when they are no longer capable of working, that’s a bit of a non sequitur.

Humans aren’t tools.

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

#308

Post by simonw »

Joel_Mckay wrote: post #290

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 hallucina…

I've only seen the one paper about that incorrect belief of performance improvements (the widely referenced METR study), are there others I've missed?

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

#309

Post by mystifyingpoi »

bayarearefugee wrote: post #269
reactordev wrote: post #266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Which is unfortunately very true. I think, that in a healthy organization such kind of mentoring requires extremely well defined boundaries and rules. Can I spend 1h of my time explaining basic stuff to a junior, who will then be able to finish his task in 2h instead of 8h? Mathematically this is a win for the company. But economically, maybe that junior dev should be fired.

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

#310

Post by devmor »

mensetmanusman wrote: post #192
gnerd00 wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

that is absolutely false - the capital and resources used to create these things are societal scale. An individual consumer is not paying that cost at this time.

That only proves the point. If something increases the value of someone’s time by 5% and 500,000,000 people are affected by it, the cost will collapse. These models are only going to get better and cheaper per watt.

> These models are only going to get better and cheaper per watt.

What do you base this claim on? They have only gotten exponentially more expensive for decreasing gain so far - quite the opposite of what you say.

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