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

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

elma.dev

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

321–330 of 481 posts

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

#321

Post by davidmurdoch »

AdrianB1 wrote: post #249
davidmurdoch wrote: post #168

AI was supposed to get rid of juniors (and seniors, soon).

No, it was supposed to get rid of the seniors because they cost more and replace them with cheap juniors + AI. If you need some humans and you are a corpo bean counter, the cheaper the body the better.

But that wouldn't make any sense. It's not `plus`; it's `times`. AI is supposed to be a force _multiplier_, at least in the context of a complex organization and product (on small projects where vibe-coding is good enough I think AI is a massive plus!).

If a junior is about 50% as useful as a baseline senior, and today, AI's usefulness is only slightly better than the person using it, then 50% * 75% gives you output equal to about 37.5% of a senior. The junior just ships more junior-level output; and in a complex product and complex orgs, this just ends up being a drain on everyone else.

But in the hands of a senior, 100% (senior) * 125% (ai), we get a slightly better senior.

Its not a perfect analogy, and AI is new territory with lots of surprises. AI code reviews, have been separated from the confirmation bias of the driver of the AI, _are_ where I'm seeing the greatest impact on junior engineers. These AI reviews seem to be getting things closer to a level playing field.

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

#322

Post by XenophileJKO »

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.

Quite honestly after using Copilot, Claude Code, Cursor, and Codex extensively for months, I very rarely hand edit code.

The rabbit hole problem is pretty rare. Usually it happens when the model flips into "stupid mode", some kind of context poisoning. If you are experienced, you know to purge the context when that happens.

In personal projects I avoid manual editing as a form of deliberate practice. At work, I only edit when it is a very small edit. I can usually explain what I want more concisely and quickly than hand editing code.

I probably would use more hand editing if I had classic refactoring tools in the IDEs similar to intellij/pycharm. Though cli based tools were a pleasant surprise once I actively started using them.

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

#323

Post by vlovich123 »

peteforde wrote: post #316
vlovich123 wrote: post #296

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

An experienced UI developer probably would have still been faster than I. That puts me closer into the junior camp (eg I wouldn’t really know where to start and just start by stumbling around) when I’m by myself but an LLM lets me get back closer to my level of expertise and velocity.

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

#324

Post by dpflan »

Hendrikto wrote: post #71
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…

> 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?

The study you are alluding to is this one by METR (Model Evaluation & Threat Research):

Measuring the Impact of Early-2025 AI on Experienced Open-Source Developer Productivity

- https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.09089

""" Before starting tasks, developers forecast that allowing AI will reduce completion time by 24%. After completing the study, developers estimate that allowing AI reduced completion time by 20%. Surprisingly, we find that allowing AI actually increases completion time by 19%—AI tooling slowed developers down. This slowdown also contradicts predictions from experts in economics (39% shorter) and ML (38% shorter). """

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

#325

Post by the_other »

square_usual wrote: post #232
bigfishrunning wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

> 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?

My experience in the UK has been that seniors and principles just write more/better code and occasionally deal with “the business” with (justifiably) greater attention paid to their input. I’d love to see a proper culture of mentoring.

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

#326

Post by arcanemachiner »

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.

Which has nothing to do with the argument you're responding to.

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

#327

Post by godelski »

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.

There's a lot of benefits you get by mentoring. When you have to teach you're forced to think more deeply about problems, see it from different angles, and revisit questions you had when learning but tabled at that time. That last one is pretty common. There's always questions you have when learning that you have to avoid because you don't have the knowledge to answer yet, because they would take you down too deep a rabbit hole. But later you have the experience to navigate those problems.

Personally, I've learned a ton while teaching. It's given me many new ideas and insights. But I'm obviously not alone in this. Even Feynman talks about how teaching results in better learning

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

#328

Post by Den_VR »

jayd16 wrote: post #303
Den_VR wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

If the free market is any indication, because it’s more effective than what passes for a search engine these days.

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

#330

Post by aunty_helen »

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…

It’s like having a malicious mentor. But the frequency of which I’m bailing on reviews on the first line due to stupid stuff that has made it to a commit is quite stunning.

“Oh I thought that would be useful at some point so I just committed it.”

Beating it into developers that they need to review their own work they submit before asking someone else to waste time is the best way I’ve found so far.

Post reply on HN