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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?

#401

Post by johntash »

9dev wrote: post #388
TeMPOraL wrote: post #366

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Or the wonderful loop of "These test steps are still failing, let's try something simpler and remove the failing tests. Great! The tests are passing now!"

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

#402

Post by mbesto »

tjansen wrote: post #69

These days, AI can do much more than "Cranking out boilerplate and scaffolding, Automating repetitive routines". That was last year. With the right instructions, Claude Sonnet 4 can easily write over 99% of most business applications. You need to be specific in your instructions, though. Like "implement this table, add these fields, look at this and this implementation for reference, don't forget to do this and consi…

> With the right instructions, Claude Sonnet 4 can easily write over 99% of most business applications. You need to be specific in your instructions, though.

By your own statement then this is not an "easy" task.

Software development has never been "hard" when you're given specific instructions.

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

#403

Post by rafaelero »

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.

To be fair, even if you understand it that's doesn't mean it will work well.

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

#404

Post by sharperguy »

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…

Honestly I made similar mistakes back before AI as a junior developer, by just copy/pasting code or confusing two things.

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

#405

Post by [deleted] »

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.

[deleted]

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

#406

Post by rapind »

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.

> 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.

This is the future fellow greybeards. We will be shunned for being try-hards, and when it turns out we were right?... Well no one likes a know it all.

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

#407

Post by sumoboy »

Why is that AI was supposed to help juniors shine, because plenty of so called "senior devs" have never really learned properly, bad habits, or lack technical breadth to be called that. This article is nothing more than what everyone else has been saying for two years, poorly at best. AI + coding has yet to hit it's stride and at some point highly specific LLM's will take into account of architecture, patterns, use-cases, compute environments, network, dev ops, testing, and coding to further equalize and close the gaps between the two roles. I've talked to seniors devs many are not interested in AI coding, just not the way they do things.

The only real advantage a senior dev has today is domain knowledge specific to a business in many cases. Even that is not much to hold on to because when layoffs come if nobody is hiring jr's then the seniors are getting axed.

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

#408

Post by stevage »

fxj wrote: post #55
pagutierrezn wrote: post #22

AI is filling "narrow" gaps. In the case of seniors these are: -techs they understand but still not master. AI aids with implementation details only experts knowb about - No time for long coding tasks. It aids with fast implementations and automatic tests. - No time for learning techs that adress well understood problems. Ai helps with quick intros, fast demos and solver of learners' misunderstandings In essence, in…

In my experience AI is wikipedia/stackoverflow on steroids when I need to know something about a field I dont know much about. It has nice explanations and you can ask for examples or scenarios and it will tell you what you didnt understand. Only when you know about the basic notions in the field you want to work with AI can be productive. This is not only valid for coding but also for other fields in science and hum…

I've been really caught out a few times when ChatGPT's knowledge is flawed. It gets a lot of stuff about DuckDB deeply wrong. Maybe it's just out of date, but it repeatedly claims that DuckDB doesn't enforce any constraints, for instance..

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

#409

Post by stevage »

ewoodrich wrote: post #395
lazide wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

>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

Yeah I've had that one a lot. Or, it's a real option that exists in a different, but similar product, but not in this one.

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

#410

Post by virtue3 »

roarcher wrote: post #374
tlonny wrote: post #355

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I'm glad I'm not the only one who gets viscerally irritated when I'm asked to review a PR that was obviously generated. You didn't take the time to write this code, but you expect me to take the time make sure it's correct, which will take far longer than a regular PR because there's no reason to assume an LLM even understood the task. Next time just be honest and ask me to do your work for you.

My boss decided to start putting out a ton of PRs from Devin at one point. I told him I'm spending more time reviewing his PRs than he was saving.
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