Doesn't this feel similar to how we talked about people using Google search to find answers to programming problems, instead of reading documentation and understanding things before writing code? Or how we criticized not using IDEs and just writing raw code without syntax editors? Or if we go further back - using calculators instead of calculating in your mind?
I remember talking to an old man when I was a kid - he used to mock me for not knowing how to recite the alphabet in reverse order, complaining about how kids these days don't learn anything properly.
New junior developers can’t code
91–100 of 138 posts
Re: New junior developers can’t code
#92Earlier quoted context omitted.
Old people have been complaining about the youth for 2000 years but THIS time they're right.
So the youth are always correct and always an improvement?
No, but the best of them will generally do great things with the tools they are afforded. Just like all the previous generations.
Re: New junior developers can’t code
#93The reason why these articles appear every 5 years is because many engineers pride themselves on how they solve problems. And then when they see people solving those problems without putting in the hard work that they had to put in, it really bothers them. This is a timeless post. We'll see it today. We'll see it in five years. We'll see it in 10 years.
Yes. Ten years ago some friends asked me to teach PHP to them, I showed them the book I learned from 20 years ago. It had 1200 pages and you could learn web development and MySQL without using the Internet. No one used that book. They searched for easy ingestable tutorials and went from there. After a year, some of them actually wrote software in production. I can't know if more or less of them would be able to write software, if they had used the book. But sure enough, I was disappointed that they didn't.
My oldest son doesn't even use tutorials, he uses LLMs. Only time will tell, if his way is worse than mine. And right now, I think it doesn't really matter _how_ he learns writing software. It matters more that he doesn't stop doing that.
Re: New junior developers can’t code
#94Earlier quoted context omitted.
A reliable system will need a relatively formal “proof” that what it does is correct. Code is currently the easiest and most convenient encoding for lots of folks to express such logic. So they’ll need to learn to read the syntax even if they write less of it. So I think people will be able to put together lots of code with AI and not much programming experience, but there will be a need to ensure that it does the ri…
> A reliable system will need a relatively formal “proof” that what it does is correct. One of my pet theories is that this is what programming evolves to in a few decades. Programmers write formal specifications for what should happen in some very high level language. AI + Compilers + ... take that specification, implement it, and prove that the implementation is correct and performant. Think "SQL but not just for d…
So back to waiting for "the sufficiently advanced compiler"
Re: New junior developers can’t code
#95Todays junior dev that is copying AI code without understanding it, is the same as the junior dev several years ago who did the same with stack overflow code. This is a mindset, and I don't think AI code is changing the number of people with this mindset. What it may be doing though, is letting them get away with it for longer.
This comparison of coding assistants to Stack Overflow comes up a lot so I feel like it needs to be addressed.
It is SIMILAR - it is not the same. There's a minimal element of interaction by virtue of the fact that SO code is usually not completely bespoke for the developer's requirements. They'll need to do things like change variable names, re-arrange some parts of it, etc.
The junior dev using an integrated LLMs (like with Cursor) has to do NONE of this. They simply hit the Tab key to accept and move on with their day.
There's a far larger danger of induced passivity.
Re: New junior developers can’t code
#96This weekend I tried out Cursor since I stopped paying for ChatGPT, Claude etc several months ago and wanted to see whether I should restart my subscription or to try them via a code editor.
It was honestly frightening how quickly I finished a side project this weekend, one that I had previously been struggling with on and off for a few weeks now. The scary part was that the user experience of prompting for feature requests or bugs and then seeing the code changed and the app be hot reloaded (I use Flutter which has this functionality) was so seamless that it didn't feel like a Copilot, it felt like an Autopilot. I literally felt myself losing brain cells as I could, yes, ostensibly review the code between every single prompt and change cycle, but realistically I clicked apply and checked out the UI.
However, all good things must come to an end, it seems, as I burned through all 150 credits of the free trial, but more importantly, the problem of hallucinations is still ever-present and oftentimes I'd ask it to fix an issue and it'd change some other part of the codebase in subtle ways, such that I'd notice bugs popping up that had been fixed in previous iterations, from minor to truly application-breaking. The issue now was that since I didn't write the code, it took me quite a bit longer to even understand what had been written; granted, it was less total time than if I had written everything from scratch, and it could be argued that reading it is no different than reading a coworker's (or one's own older) code, and I still had an LLM to guide me through it (as Cursor's chat is unlimited while their composer feature, the AI prompt and apply loop, is not), but I understand the author's point much better now.
While others in this thread and elsewhere might say it is no different than reading Stack Overflow or books of yore, the automaticity of AI and the human together feels fundamentally different than what came before. Truly, I felt much more like a product manager, citing feature requests and bugs, than I ever did as an actual developer during this loop, only this time our knowledge and experience will be so eroded that we won't be able to fix novel problems in the future and will rely on our learned helplessness in asking the AI to fix it, as I had increasingly felt as the easier this loop got.
Re: New junior developers can’t code
#97Todays junior dev that is copying AI code without understanding it, is the same as the junior dev several years ago who did the same with stack overflow code. This is a mindset, and I don't think AI code is changing the number of people with this mindset. What it may be doing though, is letting them get away with it for longer.
This comparison of coding assistants to Stack Overflow comes up a lot so I feel like it needs to be addressed. It is SIMILAR - it is not the same. There's a minimal element of interaction by virtue of the fact that SO code is usually not completely bespoke for the developer's requirements. They'll need to do things like change variable names, re-arrange some parts of it, etc. The junior dev using an integrated LLMs (…
I wrote another much longer comment but you summarized it nicely, there becomes a sort of learned helplessness that even experienced engineers will start experiencing, as I had when I used Cursor, because it's just much easier to continue pressing tab than to actually review every single change thoroughly, and that is where the danger lies, especially with subtle hallucination-induced bugs.
Re: New junior developers can’t code
#98Earlier quoted context omitted.
I didn't say anything about their morality, just that by some statistics gen z is better than previous generations. They are not better or worse. Just different. Their music sucks, though.
“Better” because they’ve found even worse replacements. Who needs to get a girl pregnant, when you can jack off twice a day to a unique body every day for the next decade? Heck, why even get married or even get a girlfriend at all, at any point (also a statistical low)? Who needs alcohol and drugs, when you can drown your sorrows into hundreds of hours of gaming? And you’ve been doing this since you were 10 years old…
Are you seriously comparing drugs and alcohol with video games and saying video games are worse replacements?
What the hell is wrong with you? Most people get bored of any particular game given enough time. Any psychological dependency will disappear and fade away.
The reason drugs screw you over is that they enter your brain directly. The brain can't cope with direct chemical alterations through countermeasures on a mental level. For the brain to protect itself from that, it would need to activate the immune system and send out macrophages etc to physically get rid of the chemicals.
Re: New junior developers can’t code
#99Earlier quoted context omitted.
Since the StackOverflow code was not an identical perfect fit for the problem you had in mind, you still had to have some mental awareness to what you are doing. Now they can just go to Claude and "say I have this solution, and that problem, someone says this should fit into that, what do" and they get the glue inserted without gaining the basic understanding they'd get from putting the glue there themselves.
Agreed. I'd say there is a ladder to the cognitive aspect of writing code. 1. Constructing an algorithm yourself from first principles, then implementing it. Let's call this "architect level" 2. Reading someone else's description of an algorithm (from a textbook, a blog post, etc.) and implementing it yourself. "Senior dev level" 3. Starting with an existing implementation, treating certain parts of that implementati…
There is a rung 5, using an idea integrated with an LLM agent, like Cursor or Windsurf. It becomes trivially easy to simply prompt it for features or bugs and to tab through the changes it makes to your codebase such that you don't even have to do any copy pasting at all.
Re: New junior developers can’t code
#100Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don’t think it’s a great analogy, and here’s why: When trying to get from point A to point B, there is a clear, well defined goal. Streets (paths) are also clear and well defined (within reason on most popular GPS direction software). An expert in city streets may get you there a little faster, but the end result of both GPS directions and city street experts is the same; getting you to B. What’s more, once you’re…
> When trying to get from point A to point B, there is a clear, well defined goal. In programming, you also go from point A (requirements analysis phase) to point B (shipping the product). The only difference is that you may face multiple paths leading to point B.
I feel like I shouldn’t need to point out how literally going from point A to point B is wildly different than going from a requirement to a shipped product.
Or how your example “a shipped product” is not a well defined goal.
Please don’t just play semantics.