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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?

#351

Post by bentt »

leemoore wrote: post #241
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…

My success and experience generally matches yours (and the authors'). Based on my experience over the last 6 months, nothing here around more senior developers getting more productivity and why is remotely controversial. It's fascinating how a report like yours or theirs acts as a lightning rod for those who either haven't been able to work it out or have rigid mental models about how AI doesn't work and want to disp…

Great post and thanks for the perspective. You have to be open minded to even try, and so that selects for only some devs. Then among the open minded, you need to be skeptical and careful, which again selects down. So the devs that are having positive experiences are likely in a minority.

Balance that against the threat AI poses to livelihoods and it's not a shock that overall sentiment is negative. But I would guess it will shake out in the direction we are pushing, at least in the nearer (3yr) term.

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

#352

Post by nicce »

skydhash wrote: post #166
fsloth wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This. You _have_ to write the spec. The result is that instead of spending X units of time on spec and THEN y units of time on coding, you get the whole thing in x units of time AND you have a spec. The trick is knowning where the particular LLM sucks. I expect in a short amount of time there is no productivity gain but when you start to understand the limitations and strengths - holey moley.

> The result is that instead of spending X units of time on spec and THEN y units of time on coding, you get the whole thing in x units of time AND you have a spec. It's more like x units of time thinking and y units of times coding, whereas I see people spend x/2 thinking, x typing the specs, y correcting the specs, and y giving up and correcting the code.

But if you can’t define the specs, you can’t write the code without LLM either?

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

#353

Post by segmondy »

well, you believed the wrong folks

Here's from my bsky feed 8 months ago after I took LLM to advent of code with local 32b model.

‪Segmond‬ @segmond.bsky.social‬ · 8mo I can confidently say that interns and junior developers can be replaced with AI. I also believe that mid to senior devs can double their output, meaning possibly less need for developers.

I haven't looked at other industries, but I believe this applies to any work that uses computers. ‪ This is inevitable, I'm tempted to write a detailed HOWTO, but what's the point when the value unlike past techs benefits a few folks more than society as a whole? I like AI but as an individual I worry a bit about how the entire thing will play it.

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

#354

Post by lkey »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #346
Hendrikto wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

> Wasn’t there a study that said that using LLMs makes people feel more productive while they actually are not? Curious about specifics of this study. Because in general, how one feels is critical to productivity. It's hard to become more productive when the work is less and less rewarding. The infamous "zone" / "flow state" involves, by its very definition, feeling of increasing productivity being continuously reinf…

perceived result: 20% faster

actual result: 20% slower

link: https://metr.org/blog/2025-07-10-early-2025-ai-experienced-o...

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

#355

Post by tlonny »

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.

The rank disrespect of somebody asking you to review something they haven't even looked at is eye watering.

I feel like AI-induced brain-rot of engineers is inevitable. Unless we see AI leapfrog into something close to AGI in the future (certainly not ruling this out), I think there will be very lucrative careers available to engineers who can maintain a balanced relationship with AI.

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

#356

Post by hamandcheese »

exe34 wrote: post #211
fluidcruft wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

True but the n00b is very fast. A lot of coaching is waiting for the n00b to perform tasks and meta things about motivation. These LLM are extremely fast and eager to work. I don't need a study to tell me that five projects that have been stuck in slow plodding along waiting for me to ever have time or resources for nearly ten years. But these are now nearing completion after only two months of picking up Claude Code…

> I don't need a study to tell me that five projects that have been stuck in slow plodding along waiting for me to ever have time or resources for nearly ten years. that's the issue in the argument though. it could be that those projects would also have been completed in the same time if you had simply started working on them. but honestly, if it makes you feel productive to the point you're doing more work than you…

> if you had simply started working on them.

The magic of Claude is that you can simply start.

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

#357

Post by ponector »

Avicebron wrote: post #118
rolisz wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And then they skip to another job for more money, and you start again with a new hire.

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,…

Mentor usually has no power over the compensation for the mentee.

Also it is never a policy to pay competitively for the existing employees, only for the new hires.

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

#358

Post by peteforde »

vlovich123 wrote: post #323
peteforde wrote: post #316

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

We might just have to agree to disagree. I believe that an experienced developer brings instincts and stacked skills even to domains where they have never touched.

In other words, I don't think that you temporarily regress to "junior" just because you're working on something new. You still have a profound fundamental understanding of how technology works and what to expect in different situations.

This reminds me of the classic "what happens when you type google.com into a web browser" question, with its nearly infinite layers of abstraction from keyboard switches to rendering a document with calls to a display driver and photons hitting your visual receptors.

We might just be quibbling over terminology, however.

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

#359

Post by AdrianB1 »

davidmurdoch wrote: post #321
AdrianB1 wrote: post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I agree this does not make sense for you and me, but it makes sense for the corpo bean counters that don't understand how this works and they were told AI makes people better, so they need less people and less skilled people. It is not hard to get to the wrong conclusions based on the AI marketing materials.

I see the discussions around AI in my company (big, not IT but with several large IT departments) and even our MBA IT leaders believe all the buzzwords to the letter.

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

#360

Post by xp84 »

mystifyingpoi wrote: post #309
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.

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.

That's the problem -- except in the rare type of org that thinks past quarterly or annual results and thus values training up a pipeline to be the future seniors -- economically speaking, all the junior devs should be fired, and the simple tasks they can do are the same set of tasks that can be accomplished by a senior at the helm of AI at 10-50x the speed.
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