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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?

#361

Post by ewoodrich »

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.

This can go both ways though. I've had instances where after a long somewhat tedious back and forth with Claude Code what I'm looking for finally "clicks" and it starts one-shotting requests left and right. But then after coming up to the end of the context window, I compact or ask it to update CLAUDE.md with what it learned and it loses the nuanced understanding it built up through trial and error and starts screwing up in the exact same ways again with fresh context.

And then I waste 20 minutes bashing my head against the wall trying to write three paragraphs meticulously documenting all the key gotchas and lessons from the "good" context window with the magic combination of words needed to get Claude back in the right head space to one-shot again.

At least if I pull that off I can usually ask Claude to use it as documentation for the project CLAUDE.md with a pretty good success rate. But man it leaves a bad taste in my mouth and makes me question whether I'm actually saving time or well into sunk cost territory...

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

#362

Post by john-tells-all »

It's a thinking challenge, not an AI challenge.

A while back, a junior asked me a question. They wanted to do X, they had code, with error Y. So they searched for it, got a page on Stack Overflow, pasted "the answer", then got a new and different error.

They:

- didn't understand the original code

- didn't understand the original error

This is fine. They then searched for the error and found a relevant page.

This is also fine. However, they:

- cut-pasted "an answer" from SO _without understanding if it was relevant or not_

The junior was hoping to work with a Puzzle: adding information will gradually give them a solution. In practice they are working with a Mystery: more information makes the task harder since they can't distinguish between different aspects.

I focused them on a few relevant details and let them go to it.

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

#363

Post by reactordev »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #339
reactordev wrote: post #334

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

[flagged]

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

#364

Post by behringer »

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.

The policeman says to the judge, on the stand "I don't know why my sworn affidavit says that, your honor. But I can write twice as many affidavits now so it's all for the best."

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

#365

Post by s1artibartfast »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #349
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…

The best way I’ve come to describe LLMs is as an ambitious, occasionally bewilderingly stupid but always incredibly hard working junior employee. You have to watch what it’s doing. And you can’t let it take out into territory you don’t understand, because it will fuck up off leash. But it will thanklessly iterate revision after revision in the way one would ordinarily do with a team, but now don’t need to for tasks t…

My mental model is a very smart and interesting stranger at a bar.

Sometimes detail accuracy is sacrificed in service of a good story. Sometimes they simply full of shit and double down when pushed.

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

#366

Post by TeMPOraL »

ponector wrote: post #343
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.

If you don't understand you code how you can be sure it's correct? You actually are pushing it into your colleagues who will verify and fix the code later.

Testing.

The only thing that changed with AI is that the narrative went from "you can't always know perfectly what every part of the program does" to "don't even try".

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

#368

Post by moomoo11 »

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.

It’s pretty great actually.

We can filter out useless people faster.

The days of easy 400k plus TC are over and only people deserving of that should get it imo.

And btw I worked with idiots before, and I’m sure I will in the future. But there should be less of them.

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

#369

Post by dns_snek »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #348
dns_snek wrote: post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> Yet in conclusion, this self-reported figure is stated as an independently observed fact. When people without ADHD take stimulants they also self-report increased productivity, higher accuracy, and faster task completion but all objective measurements are negatively affected. Interesting analogy, because all those studies with objective measurements are defied by US students year by year, come finals seasons.

Yeah, they take them because they get high. Believing in things that are unsupported by empirical evidence is in the domain of religion, not science.

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

#370

Post by dns_snek »

simonw wrote: post #304
dns_snek wrote: post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

I haven't seen any but I also don't follow the research that closely.
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