It’s like me using WebMD. I might get lucky and diagnose correctly or I might accidentally kill myself. You don’t know what you don’t know.
AI was supposed to help juniors shine. Why does it mostly make seniors stronger?
381–390 of 481 posts
Re: AI was supposed to help juniors shine. Why does it mostly make seniors stronger?
#382Because 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 correct response to that is "what's your job?"
It's baffling how little awareness some people have.
Re: AI was supposed to help juniors shine. Why does it mostly make seniors stronger?
#383Because 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.
Pre AI I can understand why you might not know. There have been instances where I find a recipe, take what I need, but there’s some code I can’t understand or find an answer to. But time pressure, so I just add a comment and ask around for ideas.
These days, just ask the llm.
Re: AI was supposed to help juniors shine. Why does it mostly make seniors stronger?
#384Because 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.
100%. This has in general become a trend across my company. Less so developers, more so everyone else spitting LLM generated content, and asking real people to review and provide feedback. I mean , WTF.
Re: AI was supposed to help juniors shine. Why does it mostly make seniors stronger?
#385Earlier quoted context omitted.
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".
Sad reality is test engineers headcount over last years was cut even more than developers. Most companies see testing as obstacle and unnecessary costs and has no will to invest into testing.
Re: AI was supposed to help juniors shine. Why does it mostly make seniors stronger?
#386It's hard to live both at the macro level and the micro level at the same time. Seniors are charged with the macro, the big picture design choices. Juniors are charged with the micro, implementing user stories. AI makes seniors stronger because it is very good at giving micro-level awareness with little time investment. It's a powerful bit of leverage to drive execution.
Re: AI was supposed to help juniors shine. Why does it mostly make seniors stronger?
#387Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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.
You can also simply start without Claude too!
Re: AI was supposed to help juniors shine. Why does it mostly make seniors stronger?
#388Earlier quoted context omitted.
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".
But the LLM writes the tests too. Probably even made some private methods public so it can test them, because you asked it to write a comprehensive test suite. It’s a beautiful self-jerk circle of shitty code based on wrong assumptions proven by correct tests testing shitty code based on wrong assumptions…
Re: AI was supposed to help juniors shine. Why does it mostly make seniors stronger?
#389Earlier 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.
15 years later when the folks you mentored are sitting on hiring panels, it doesn’t seem so bad.
Obviously that’s not why I did it, but I am not unhappy about it either.
Re: AI was supposed to help juniors shine. Why does it mostly make seniors stronger?
#390Because 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.
My interactions with Gemini tend to be fairly slow, but it's because I don't give it any extra permissions, make it research and plan an implementation first, and check each file update one at a time.
So far it has still been a bit more productive for me, though the margin is low. I get more product sork done on the order of 5-15%, I tend to have more test coverage as I focus more heavily on that, and I can focus more often on architecture. The last one is a win for me, I prefer that work and find that I can review code quickly enough to make it worth the tradeoff.