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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?

#391

Post by cjonas »

flustercan wrote: post #219
cjonas wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ya the early "studies" that said AI would benefit low skill more than senior never seem grounded in reality. Coding with AI is like having a team of juniors that can complete their assignments in a few minutes instead of days. The more clear your instructions, the closer it is to what you wanted, but there are almost always changes needed. Unfortunately it really does make the junior dev position redundant (although…

I've never worked anywhere where the role of a Sr was to glue together a bunch of small pieces written by a team of Jr devs. I've only worked places where Jr's were given roughly the same scope of work as a mid-level dev but on non-critical projects where they could take as much time as necessary and where mistakes would have a very small blast radius. That type of Jr work has not been made redundant - although I sup…

If worked with many companyies that have only 1 SR dev per team. The SR typically spends at least half their time overseeing the work of the rest of the team... Not saying this is a good structure but it is common.

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

#393

Post by _heimdall »

morkalork wrote: post #268
shaky-carrousel wrote: post #259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unfortunately, the type of work you hate doing is perfect for a junior. Easy tasks to get a hold on the system.

>How'd you get so good at debugging and navigating code you've never seen before? >Because I spent a couple internships and a whole year as a junior debugging, triaging and patching every single issue reported by other developers and the QA team Was I jealous that the full time and senior devs got to do all the feature work and architecture design? Yes. Am I a better developer having done that grind? Also yes.

100%. I shouldn't have done the architecture work on any meaningful scale early on, but I was always interested. My early roles were largely me being able to architect smaller pieces in a larger plan, building some architecture skills while learning larger patterns that worked and thought processes along the way.

I'd recommend that approach to anyone working with more junior devs.

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

#394

Post by jongjong »

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…

That makes sense. When Claude Code suggests a bad approach, I kind of shrug it off and suggest a different approach. I don't think of it like a negative because I basically go through a similar process of ideation before I implement a feature and I typically discard ideas before arriving at the right one so Claude Code is part of the ideation process for me. The code it produces gives me a clear idea about how complex/ugly the solution will be. I know what 'ugly' looks like.

I imagine a junior might actually jump at the first solution because they don't have any other arrows in their quiver so-to-speak. The LLM is acting like the engineering manager but it's actually really bad at that.

The LLM is like a stereotypical programmer with 0 common sense. The kind who can produce good code but you have to micromanage every single decision. It's terrible if you put it in charge. It doesn't have any opinions about architecture or code quality so it just follows the structure of the existing code base... There's a tendency towards increasing complexity, more hacks more chaos.

It often tries to hack/cheat its way to a solution. It requires a constant effort to maintain order.

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

#395

Post by ewoodrich »

lazide wrote: post #215
Den_VR wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perhaps asking the machine to do your job for you isn’t as effective asking the machine to help you think like a senior and find the information you need to do the job yourself.

When you ask it for information and it just makes it up (like I just described), how is that helping the senior? I’ve literally asked for details about libraries I know exist by name , and had every llm I’ve tried (Claude, Gemini Pro, ChatGPT) just make shit up that sounded about right, but was actually just-wrong-enough-to-lead-me-on-a-useless-rabbit-hole-search. At least most people on stackoverflow saying that kin…

I have been burned so many times asking LLMs about whether some tool/app/webapp has a feature, if so where I can find or enable or disable it, etc. The number of "just plausible enough to believe" hallucinations I've got back as answers is absolutely maddening.

I've lost count of how many times I've asked whether some command line tool has an option or config available for some niche case and ChatGPT or Gemini shouts "Yes! Absolutely! just use '--use-external-mode' to get the behavior you want, it's that simple!" and it's 100% hallucination created by mangling together my intent with a real option in the docs but which in reality does not actually exist nor has it ever existed. It's even worse with GUI/menu navigation questions I'm guessing because it's even less grounded by text-based docs and trivially easy to bullshit that an option is buried in Preferences, the External tab maybe, somewhere, probably.

The desperate personality tuning to please the user at all costs combined with LLMs inherently fuzzy averaging of reality produces negative value whenever I truly need a binary yes/no "Does X exist in Y or not?" answer to a technical question. Then I waste a bunch of time falling back to Google trying to definitively prove or disprove whether "--use-external-mode" is a real thing and sure enough, it's not.

It does occasionally lead to hilariously absurd exchanges where when challenged instead of admitting its mistake the LLM goes on to invent an elaborate entirely fabricated backstory about the implementation of the "--use-external-mode" command to explain why despite appearing to not exist, it actually does but due to conflicts with X and Y it isn't supported on my environment, etc, etc.

I use Claude Code, Roo Code, Codex and Gemini CLI constantly so I'm no kneejerk LLM hater to be clear. But for all the talk about being "a better version of Google" I have had so much of my time wasted by sending me down endless rabbit holes where I ignored my sneaking suspicion I was being lied to because the answer sounded just so plausibly perfect. I've had the most success by far as a code generation tool vs. a Google replacement.

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

#396

Post by smsm42 »

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…

> they respond with "I don't know, claude did that"

A huge red flag right here. Its ok to not know things, its ok to use LLM to fill the gaps. Its ok to fail. It is in no way ok to not care and only fess up to having a mass of code you have no idea about when your senior reviewer asks you about it. At the very minimum the ask should go the other direction - "I got this generated code and I am not sure I understand what's going on, could you help me to see if that's the right direction" would be acceptable. Just not caring is not.

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

#397

Post by brunooliv »

I’ve been reading the comments here… idk which companies you all work at, but, at least in all places I’ve worked you’ll have 2/3 people who are REALLY GOOD. Then you’ll have like 3/4 people who can sort of “trail” after those. And then there’s “the rest”. I’ve seen “the rest” making informed and “well planned” decisions that are just terrible approaches to a given problem. An LLM can actually be a net positive versus this rest.

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

#399

Post by qmr »

tlonny wrote: post #355
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.

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.

Stop saying engineer when you mean programmer.

It’s an insult to real engineers.

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

#400

Post by johntash »

AndrewDucker wrote: post #350
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 know" then how could you have "easily verified it was correct"?

I think they were claiming claude easily verified it? i.e. they have total faith in claude to not mess up
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