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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?

#331

Post by torben-friis »

qazxcvbnmlp wrote: post #317
victor9000 wrote: post #291

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Any situation where you’re submitting under your signature code to production without knowing what it does should be at the very least cause for a talk.

I’m kinda shocked that this even has to be said.

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

#333

Post by bonoboTP »

jayd16 wrote: post #306

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.

"Replace" and "help" are really different concepts.

It's the same as other automation. The lower skill parts can be automated, so if that's all you can do, it will be tough for you. If you have higher skills, then your work remains more useful.

There's nothing strange or counterintuitive about this.

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

#334

Post by reactordev »

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.

Someone mentored you, pay it forward. If you think you got where you are entirely on your own, you need therapy.

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

#336

Post by TeMPOraL »

bigfishrunning wrote: post #252
square_usual wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

Except that most of the code seniors review was written with intention, not just the most statistically most likely response to a given query. As a senior engineer, the kinds of mistakes that AI makes are much more bizarre then the mistakes junior engineers make

> Except that most of the code seniors review was written with intention, not just the most statistically most likely response to a given query.

Given the nature of the statistics in question, the line between the two is extremely blurry at this point.

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

#337

Post by j45 »

Because it's early.

Seniors can figure out how to make it work and help set it up for juniors.

Traditionally in tech there has been an age bias against experience over time and maybe that's balancing out and both juniors and seniors will learn and have things to contribute in their own way.

My key advice to juniors: play and build constantly. Try out anything that interests you and follow along on youtube. This is how a lot of seniors are able to show they're quite flexible in their thinking and learning and it's not about one tech, or language, or framework or following what others do.

Juniors already have transferrable skills, will have way more, and can learn even faster if they want to partner with seniors, who generally would love to have more people to go put a dent in things.

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

#338

Post by [deleted] »

torben-friis wrote: post #331
qazxcvbnmlp wrote: post #317

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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.

Any situation where you’re submitting under your signature code to production without knowing what it does should be at the very least cause for a talk. I’m kinda shocked that this even has to be said.

[deleted]

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

#339

Post by TeMPOraL »

reactordev wrote: post #334
bayarearefugee wrote: post #269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Someone mentored you, pay it forward. If you think you got where you are entirely on your own, you need therapy.

Oh come on. Plenty of us here never had any form of direct mentorship at work or otherwise. It's not unusual when you pick up the trade as a hobby in your teens, and in terms of programming and technical skills (which is what we're discussing here), you stopped being a junior before getting your first job.

Myself, I learned from many folks on IRC and ol' phpBB boards, and I helped others on IRC and said phpBB boards in return; almost all of that was before graduating. That, and books, lots of books, and even more time spent just reading code online and writing my own. None of that hardly qualifies as "mentoring".

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

#340

Post by zarzavat »

mattmanser wrote: post #70
thecupisblue wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pretty much, but it already starts at the prompting and context level. Senior engineers either already know exactly where the changes need to be made and can suggest what to do. They probably know the pitfalls, have established patterns, architectures and designs in their head. Juniors on the other hand don't have that, so they go with whatever. Nowadays a lot of them also "ask ChatGPT about its opinion on architectu…

I was thinking about this last week. I don't think this is necessarily a massive moat for senior programmers. I feel it's a not a massive jump to teach AI architecture patterns and good data modelling? I feel that anthropic etc al. just haven't got to that training stage yet. That then leaves you with the mental model problem. Yes, there then a large context problem, but again I was wondering if setting up an MCP tha…

After having used Claude for a couple of months it's really nowhere close.

We are at the level of the original Waymo cars where they had to have a person behind the wheel ready to take the controls, just in case it inexplicably decided to drive off a bridge.

As Claude's safety driver I have to intervene in perhaps 25-50% of tasks. Some days I don't even open Claude because I'm working on a part of the codebase that has to be just so and I know Claude would mess it up.

The moat is real. I don't have any illusions that one day Claude will catch up but that's at least 5 years away.

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