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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?

#411

Post by bentt »

somethingsome wrote: post #371
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…

Aaaha for me it was exactly the other way around! I had a very complex piece of logic, with many many many moving parts. So I implemented many paths of that logic by hand, every one with their own specifics. Every path took something like 200-400 lines of code. When this was done and correct. It was difficult to see the moving parts through the forest. Some code was similar but still a bit different, and hard to thin…

Ah this is great, and I can see how that would be useful. In a way, it's just "there's a clear spec" by another path, but it's just defined by all the code you wrote.

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

#412

Post by bentt »

raphinou wrote: post #74
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…

I usually ask it to build a feature based on a specification I wrote. If it is not exactly right, it is often the case that editing it myself is faster than iterating with the ai, which has sometimes put me in an infinite loop of corrections requests. Have you encountered this too?

Yes in that case I just paste it back in. Sometimes I start a whole new chat after that.

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

#413

Post by grayhatter »

reactordev wrote: post #363
TeMPOraL wrote: post #339

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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]

> If you didn’t go that route, you were still looked at as a junior. Your ego clouds your view.

your ego clouds your response.

He wasn't talking about if he was hired into a jr role, he was talking about the competency, experience, and skills acquired from the years of writing code for passion. If he could write better code, or debug problems faster than your average jr level employee.

Not everyone fits into the tiny bucket you've imagined must hold everyone. The answer could easily be, we hired you because you ticked all the boxes, but no one doing the interview could tell they were completely out classed.

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

#414

Post by IggleSniggle »

reactordev wrote: post #363
TeMPOraL wrote: post #339

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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]

Everyone is looked at as a young person when they are young. I've definitely had "junior" colleagues that "got it" better than my 50yo colleagues. It's possible I shouldn't say that outloud, because skilled youngsters have a tendency to misidentify themselves as being part of that set while the wise youngsters have a tendency to *underestimate* their own capability or insight. But I don't think you can make that same assumption about a senior thinking back to their early years.

I desperately wish, to this day, that I had been in the position to receive mentorship. I basically hang out on HN as a way to gather it where I can. Attended engineering meetups when I was younger as well. But I never had the benefit of working with engineers senior to myself. I was a junior "business employed person" but when you need to make a roof you do what you can and learn the hard way even if there's no other humans to show you how to make a proper roof. Luckily, you can receive mentorship not just online, but through books, or even just studying the craft of others...but you take what you can get.

Receiving mentorship is such a gift, and as I approach the end of my career, I am still hungry for it, and harboring some degree of wistful envy for those that receive mentorship as an engineer. I've had many great mentors, but my for the most part, engineering mentors have never seen my face, heard my voice, or known my name, and certainly not for the first decade of my professional career as a software developer, where I didn't have any other developers to work with.

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

#415

Post by realisticfoo »

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.

Well no one actually asked you for a review, it's just a stupid checkbox item some boomer added to the list of other useless checkbox items - like group calls where everyone is just reading list of closed tickets we can all read ourselves in jira. This self righteous bullshit makes the whole ordeal even more insufferable.

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

#416

Post by roarcher »

realisticfoo wrote: post #415
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.

Well no one actually asked you for a review, it's just a stupid checkbox item some boomer added to the list of other useless checkbox items - like group calls where everyone is just reading list of closed tickets we can all read ourselves in jira. This self righteous bullshit makes the whole ordeal even more insufferable.

Consider that your experience may not be universal. Just because your reviews are useless rubber stamps to satisfy "some boomer" does not mean that other shops also have no standards. I get explicitly asked for reviews at work all the time, and I'm expected to actually understand the code and provide useful feedback.

By the way, you don't have to give useless reviews even if your coworkers do. It sounds like your workplace is infected with complacency, but there's no law that says you can't do better.

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

#417

Post by hamandcheese »

exe34 wrote: post #387
hamandcheese wrote: post #356

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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!

Yes, but less often.

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

#418

Post by esafak »

perrygeo wrote: post #185
chasd00 wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ve found LLMs are most useful when I know what I want to do but just don’t want to type it all out. My best success so far was an LLM saving me about 1,000 lines of typing and fixing syntax mistakes on a web component plus backend in a proprietary framework.

Yep, and the productivity of LLMs means that experienced developers can go from idea to implementation way faster. But first someone has to understand and define a solid structure. And later someone needs to review, test, and integrate the code into this framework. This is hard stuff. Arguably harder than writing code in the first place! It's no wonder inexperienced developers don't get as much out of it. They define…

It takes experience to be able to push back.

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

#419

Post by Vegenoid »

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 it’s easily verified as correct, then you should have verified its correctness before bringing it to someone more senior and asking for their help, and so you should be able to explain why it is there when they ask.

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

#420

Post by esafak »

vivzkestrel wrote: post #282
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…

my dear guy, where is the shovelware https://mikelovesrobots.substack.com/p/wheres-the-shovelware... Where's the Shovelware? Why AI Coding Claims Don't Add Up

Look at any vibe-code repo.
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