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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?

#431

Post by bluefirebrand »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #346
Hendrikto wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I could have written it but it would have taken me about 3x longer when all is said and done. Really does not sound like that from your description. It sounds like coaching a noob, which is a lot of work in itself. Wasn’t there a study that said that using LLMs makes people feel more productive while they actually are not?

> Wasn’t there a study that said that using LLMs makes people feel more productive while they actually are not? Curious about specifics of this study. Because in general, how one feels is critical to productivity. It's hard to become more productive when the work is less and less rewarding. The infamous "zone" / "flow state" involves, by its very definition, feeling of increasing productivity being continuously reinf…

Personally this might explain why I feel so demoralized by LLMs

I hate the experience of trying to write code with them. I like to just type my thoughts into the files.

I hate trying to involve the LLM, even as a search. I want my search to feel like looking up references not having a conversation with a robot

Overall, for me, the whole experience of trying to code with LLMs is both frustrating and unrewarding

And it definitely doesn't seem more efficient or faster either

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

#432

Post by gherkinnn »

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.

Code reviews are one of the few ordeals worth doing. They catch problems and transfer knowledge. In a reasonably well run org (it doesn't take much) code reviews are easily a huge net benefit.

As for "reading closed tickets", you are right. It is silly. Alas, in apathetic orgs it is a reliable way to get some people know what is going on some of the time. And that particular ordeal keeps the tickets somewhat in sync with reality.

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

#433

Post by jalapenos »

userbinator wrote: post #382
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 correct response to that is "what's your job?" It's baffling how little awareness some people have.

"What would you say... you do here?"

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

#434

Post by jalapenos »

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.

Why do we need them then? If they're some dumb passthrough I can just replace them with a background agent

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

#435

Post by jalapenos »

oblio wrote: post #347
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.

You, sir, have "executive" written all over you.

Savage

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

#436

Post by tjansen »

codr7 wrote: post #273
tjansen wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

BTW I never said they write themselves. My point was rather that you need a lot of knowledge, and know exactly what you want out of them, supervise them and provide detailed instruction. But then they can help you create a lot more working code in a shorter time.

At that point it seems to me that they become a distraction, a filter between you and the software you're building. Surely it must be easier to tell the computer directly what to do then to route the entire design through that mess?

I wouldn't call it a filter, unless you use it for trivial tasks ("check that the input argument is not null, throw an exception otherwise"). Sometimes it is useful for trivial tasks though, because it may do things a human dev would be to lazy to do. It also tends to be faster at finding things (as in "change the color of the submit button on the address form to #f00").

But the real value is implementing known patterns that are customized for your application. Adding a field or a new type to a CRUD application, implementing an algorithm, rendering some type of object in a UI...

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

#437

Post by Hilift »

jacquesm wrote: post #4

For the same reason that an amateur with a powertool ends up in the emergency room and a seasoned pro knows which way to point the business end. AI is in many ways a powertool, if you don't know what you are doing it will help you to do that much more efficiently. If you do know what you are doing it will do the same.

Supposedly in the US there are 25,000 emergency room visits per year for chainsaw injuries. Or that is what AI wants us to think, so it can take all the good chainsaw jobs.

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

#438

Post by aitchnyu »

victor9000 wrote: post #291
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…

> 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.

Is there any tool that approve a given PR is easy to review? Or should we use a checklist of function length, cognitive complexity etc?

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

#439

Post by jalapenos »

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…

Well it's not stackoverflow on steroids, otherwise it'd give you a surly "why do you want to do that?" response and then delete your question.

Man I don't miss that place or those people. Glad AI's basically destroyed it.

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

#440

Post by cs02rm0 »

nathan_compton wrote: post #162
cs02rm0 wrote: post #33

AI produces code that often looks really good, at a pace quicker than you can read it. It can be really, really hard to tell when what it's producing is a bag of ** and it's leading you down the garden path. I've been a dev for 20 years (which isn't to imply I'm any good at it yet) and it's not uncommon I'll find myself leaning on the AI a bit too hard and then you realise you've lost a day to a pattern that wasn't r…

One thing about AI that I did not anticipate is how useful it is for refactoring though. Like if I have walked down (with the help of an AI or not) a bad path, I can refactor the entire codebase to use a better strategy in much less time than before because refactoring is uniquely suited to AI - if you provide the framework, the design, the abstractions, AI can rewrite a bunch of code to use that new design. I'm fran…

It is, but again I'd caution that it will go and do things you don't want it to.

For instance, I've been working on an app recently with some social share icon logos in svg.

Whenever I get it to tweak bits of code elsewhere in the same file, 80% of the time it goes and changes those svg icons, completely corrupting some of the logos, curiously consistent in how it does it. Several times I've had that slip through and had to go and undo it again, at which point it starts to feel like the superfast junior dev you're using has malign intent!

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