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AI is making junior devs useless

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Re: AI is making junior devs useless

#381

Post by LovelyButterfly »

nerdsniper wrote: post #263
keeda wrote: post #231

I maintain that in the future, any person wishing to learn any skill (not just coding!) will need to willingly eschew the use of AI when learning until they have "built the muscles". The literature is clear that repeated, hands-on practice is really the only way to build skills. I suspect the progression will be "No AI until intuition (whatever that is for that skill)" -> "Gradual use of AI to understand where it fal…

I learned Calculus despite having access to Mathematica, TI-89/92/CX-CAS, and WolframAlpha. I still had to do hundreds of derivations and integrations and manual manipulation of separable differential equations entirely by hand to learn it. But these tools made it easier for me to understand what I was doing wrong. So, I agree with you, but it's also already been true for decades now with other tools.

In another two examples:

As a kid, I remember my teachers not allowing us to use calculators and times table pencils exactly to make us go through the painful process of using our brain to get to know math.

Today I'm doing a Master's on AI and AI is a tool I use not only to summarize, but to validate my understading. I don't jump into a GPT session asking it to do the exercise for me or to explain something. I ask it to help me finding out my error after inumerous tries; to say the same thing me in another words because English isn't my first language and often I don't know the terminology that the Academia uses; to write an analogy (which often absurd ones pop up); to guide me where I'm missing something.

It's a freaking powerful learning tool if used properly.

Re: AI is making junior devs useless

#382

Post by slopinthebag »

whattheheckheck wrote: post #373
slopinthebag wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The mechanistic myth is the belief that everything can be described as a neat hierarchical structure of things within things. And few of us realize that our entire culture is based on this fallacy. While the world consists of complex, interacting structures, we prefer to treat every phenomenon as a simple, isolated structure. > Through our software pursuits, the mechanistic myth has spread beyond its academic origi…

I wish he went on a podcast

Yes, same.

I wonder if he would go on Lex or something.

Re: AI is making junior devs useless

#383

Post by yoz-y »

nostrademons wrote: post #130
BobbyJo wrote: post #45

Junior devs have always been useless. You used to give them tasks that take them a week or two even though a senior engineer could do it in a couple hours, not because you wanted them to contribute, but because you wanted them to learn to contribute. The same ethos makes sense with AI, it's just that every company is trying to avoid paying that training tax. Why turn a junior into a senior yourself if you can get the…

It's interesting that the same dynamic is playing out on a much larger scale with children. A child is far more helpless than a junior engineer - at least a junior engineer can feed themselves, wipe their own butt, avoid destroying the room, and generally keep themselves alive. Everybody wants to offload the cost of raising children to parents, because the economic benefits aren't realized for 25+ years yet the costs…

I feel that. I am expecting my first child in a couple of months and the lack of support infrastructure makes me extremely anxious. We don’t have our family around to support us. The cost of services to take care of young children are so high that it makes almost no sense for both parents to continue working. The declining birth rates are truly no surprise.

Re: AI is making junior devs useless

#385

Post by tom_m »

It should be making them more useful. They can ask it questions to learn! It's an amazing source of information. Far more convenient than Googling and reading. It's interactive Google, interactive custom tailored education. Insane.

Re: AI is making junior devs useless

#386

Post by oddsockmachine »

weatherlite wrote: post #97
oddsockmachine wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm already seeing this in the company I recently joined: 80-90% of code is generated/prompted. Big PRs, very little review or oversight. Absolutely nobody considering long-term architecture (and IMO nobody capable of such). In general, there's very little critical thinking involved at any stage, just throw error messages back into the LLM, rinse and repeat. I'm hoping there's a world where people with skills are use…

And how do u sum up the tradeoffs so far, or is it too early to tell ? Do u see lots of unacceptable shit making into production that wouldn't have before A.I for example ?

Observations so far:

- "micro" level code is adequate. A new feature typically works as expected, and code is well documented. But macro level everything's wacky: no architectural consideration, lots of duplication, dead end paths, dead code. Nobody ever took the time to understand the context surrounding a change and figure out the most appropriate way to integrate it.

- there's no consideration for infrastructure, or how the code is run (my world). Last week we ddos'd ourselves after someone implemented a 1/s poll that runs on every open browser tab, worsened when the frontend's reconnection logic fired 1/s with no exponential backoff.

- zero critical thinking... First thing everyone did during that incident was to ask their LLM of choice why the platform was down. Investigating by hand (and my findings thereof) was dismissed, because surely Claude knows best.

I'm too old for this stuff.

Re: AI is making junior devs useless

#387

Post by JackSlateur »

keeda wrote: post #231

I maintain that in the future, any person wishing to learn any skill (not just coding!) will need to willingly eschew the use of AI when learning until they have "built the muscles". The literature is clear that repeated, hands-on practice is really the only way to build skills. I suspect the progression will be "No AI until intuition (whatever that is for that skill)" -> "Gradual use of AI to understand where it fal…

The literature is also clear: lack of practice leads to atrophy

Re: AI is making junior devs useless

#388

Post by JackSlateur »

debone wrote: post #73
PetoU wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

fwiw 90% of software is reinventing the wheel. 80% of devs have an itch to "rewrite from scratch". AI will deduplicate all of this

My experience is that 100% of AI devs are reinventing the wheel, most of the time for no better reason than "I can do it" or "not invented here"

Is it not the business model of these companies ? Bill per token and stuff

NIH = more token = good for business

Re: AI is making junior devs useless

#389

Post by Jestzer »

jimbokun wrote: post #365
keeda wrote: post #335

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Haven't been able to verify, but somebody on a podcast mentioned that sales of paper and stationery have started soaring precisely because of this. Edited to add: I think this is worth trying, but not nearly sufficient. I would not be surprised if all we see is that grades plummet because until the pen-and-paper tests the students have just been winging it with AI.

Then any student who cares about his or her grades will change his or her study habits very quickly.

I would call that an optimistic take. It’s far more likely kids will complain, which leads to parents complaining, which leads to the teacher changing whatever was being complained about. From my experiences, school seems to not be a place where people take accountability, but instead, play a constant game of shifting blame when failure arises.
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