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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?

#311

Post by [deleted] »

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.

[deleted]

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

#312

Post by Kirth »

bayarearefugee wrote: post #272
bigfishrunning wrote: post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The junior engineer will grow into a senior engineer

> The junior engineer will grow into a senior engineer And then quit after accepting a new job that pays them their modified value, because tech companies are particularly bad at proactive retention.

.. and because the job and environment weren't that pleasant or rewarding to offset that delta in income offered elsewhere at an equally drab employer

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

#313

Post by paool »

hoppp wrote: post #150
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…

Sounds like its faster to just write the code by hand

Even if that's true today ( it's not ), it becomes less true over time as tools and models improve.

If you have someone who knows what they're doing with the latest and greatest coding agents it's just not comparable. You can have a Dev open up four or more terminals with multiple prompts running at the same time. A manual person just can't keep up.

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

#314

Post by SubiculumCode »

kromokromo wrote: post #286
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.

I don't write terribly complex things: Just data processing pipelines for neuroimaging, but I know I get good results because I take time being specific in my prompts, saying what I want, but also what I don't want, suggesting certain tools, what options I want available, how I want logs, etc. I really does help it to know what you want and relaying that with an effortful prompt.

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

#315

Post by xandrius »

lazide wrote: post #59
fxj wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my experience AI is wikipedia/stackoverflow on steroids when I need to know something about a field I dont know much about. It has nice explanations and you can ask for examples or scenarios and it will tell you what you didnt understand. Only when you know about the basic notions in the field you want to work with AI can be productive. This is not only valid for coding but also for other fields in science and hum…

Except stackoverflow was only occasionally hallucinating entire libraries.

As opposed to SO always somehow ending up giving an answer where boost or jQuery was the top answer.

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

#316

Post by peteforde »

vlovich123 wrote: post #296
peteforde wrote: post #265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I can tell you exactly: it's your framing of relying on an LLM (or any outside assistance, including humans) as temporarily becoming "junior".

I feel strongly that delegation to strengths is one of the most obvious signs of experience.

Apologies for getting hung up on what might seem like trivial details, but when discussing on a text forum, word choices matter.

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

#317

Post by qazxcvbnmlp »

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.

"I don't know Claude did that" isn't a bad thing in and of itself... If someone is spending a bunch of time on code that Claude could have done and easily verified it was correct, they are going to move slower and produce less useful things of value than someone who cares about reading every line of code.

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

#318

Post by pydry »

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.

There's also not much in it for the mentor other than the warm glow in the heart.

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

#319

Post by pydry »

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.

It also says it makes seniors stronger. That hasnt been my experience.

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

#320

Post by the_other »

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.

You’d think that with more context it would get better, but it doesn’t.

My hunches are that the to-and-fro of ideas as you discuss options or make corrections leads to a context with competing “intentions”; and that they can’t tell the difference between positive and negative experiences when it comes across each successive token in the context.

But I don’t make LMMs, so this is pure guesswork.

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