I do agree it’s a great tool, so much better than trying to hope and pray someone on the internet can help you with “I don’t understand this line of code.”

However, it’s got a lot of downsides too.

Not in my experience. They just regurgitate code, and juniors don’t know if/why it’s good or bad and consequently can’t field questions on their PR.

“It’s what the LLM said.” - Great. Now go learn it and do it again yourself.

Only for people who wants be taught, this argument keeps coming up again and again but people in general doesn’t want to learn how to fish, they want the fish on a plate ready to eat, so that they can continue scrolling. I see this a lot in juniors, they are solution seekers, not problem solvers, and AI makes this difference a lot worse.

A teacher who just gives you the solution isn’t a good teacher.

You can use AI as a teacher but how many will do that?

This is the dumbest thought that proliferates this website.

Super great that it’s used to pump out tons of code because upper management wants features released even faster than before. I’m sure the junior devs who don’t know a for loop from their ass will be able to learn and understand wtf Claude is shitting out

> AI is an incredible teaching tool. It's probably better for teaching/explaining than for writing code.

It is but how do you teach to people who think their new profession is being a "senior prompt engineer" (with 4 months of experience) and who believe that in 12 months there won't be any programmer left?

>AI is an incredible teaching tool.

As a junior, my top issue is finding valuable learning material that isn't full of poor or outright wrong information.

In the best and most generous interpretation of your statement, LLM's simply removed my need to search for the information. That doesn't mean it's not of poor quality or outright wrong.

It’s gonna take a long time for that to become the norm I think. I really wish I could take 5 years off while everyone figures this out.

I'm not sure sure.

I worked under people who started as juniors that way but were politically savvy. Or just ruthless. And pushed their way to the top by stealing projects, lying through their teeth, and other such tactics.

They were slowing down progress because their methods involved sabotaging the progress of others because it might make their own contributions shine a little less.

They were the cause of using libraries like leftPad all through business critical code, and cutting anyone down who dared to simply question why.

These things cause ripples. The smartest and most capable staff leaves, what results is a churn of the same kind.

But hey, they get a trip to Mexico every year and burn through millions every two years. Profit any day now.

You definitely did see a difference between people who just copy pasted from stack overflow, and from people with good fundamentals. The uncomfortable truth though, is that the industry didn't need good coders, it needed a bucket load of basic web apps and it needed bums in seats.

I think the irony of AI is going to be that it will make the remaining software jobs properly hard again, and implementers (ex coders) will be able to succeed with even less code knowledge than before.

The issue stems from 2 things:

1) People hearing "an LLM is as smart as a junior" and actually opting for the LLM subscription price instead of hiring a junior

2) The gap between senior and junior in terms of performance has become larger, since the senior devs had their hands get dirty for years typing stuff out manually AND also tackling challenges.

This generation of junior-mid developers will have a significant portion of the "typing stuff" chopped off, and we're still pretending that this will end up being fine.

I agree with the sentiments here. But, I’m less hopeful about the presented solutions.

I think my argument against humans still needing to know how to manage complexity, is that the models will become increasingly able to manage that complexity themselves.

The only thing that informs that opinion of mine is the rate of progress the models have been making.

I think software people as a whole need to see that the capabilities won’t stop here, they’re going to keep growing. If you can describe it, an LLM will eventually be able to do it.

> Seniors come from juniors. If you want seniors, you must let the juniors write the code

The average tenure of a person in engineering role is so short that very few employers are thinking about developing individuals anymore.

The actual way this gets approached is "If you want seniors, you must hire seniors".

I'm not sure how this plays out now. But it's easy to imagine a scenario like the COBOL writers of the last generation.

Ok but even pre ai I felt like each years interns wanted to take as many shortcuts as possible and not learn.

I think the allure of high TC (150k base or more for entry level) led to many non engineer brained people to enter tech.

Many people can do rote memorization, it’s even ingrained heavily in some cultures iykyk. However they can’t come up with much original or out of the box thinking.

before you had a lesson that every engineer has to start with writing C, yet most of modern devs never did.

Seniors should be prepared that Seniority will mean different thing and path of getting there will be different too.

Just like there was a shift from lower lvl languages to high level

It’s already getting harder to find juniors willing to write the code and harder to discern whether someone is as willing as they say. And I feel like asking junior to make this decision and just have self control is a tricky double edged sword. Even if I want them to (and I do!) the competitive and ambitious juniors I suspect will still lean into AI code gen heavily as it makes them look better and seem more productive. Seniors probably need to do more than let them write the code, we probably need to figure out ways to encourage, require, or even enforce it at some level, if we want it to happen.

> Seniors come from juniors. If you want seniors, you must let the juniors write the code.

Companies know this as well, but this is a prisoner dilemma type situation for them. A company can skip out on juniors, and instead offer to pay seniors a bit better to poach them from other companies, saving money. If everyone starts doing this, everyone obviously loses - there just won't be enough new seniors to satisfy demand. Avoiding this requires that most companies play by the rules so to say, not something that's easily achieved.

And the higher the cost of training juniors relative to their economic output, the greater the incentive to break the rules becomes.

I hope you don’t have actual users.

>> who literally hadn't even completed an HTML course.

so what is their value? proxy your requests to ai?

> As with everything in life: you can choose to hard route or you can choose the easy route and your results will follow accordingly.

Hard agree, but probably not in the way you're implying.

It's the difficult things that make life fun and interesting. A life spent going from one easy thing to another is a life barely lived at all.

I don't expect them to realise that until some time after it actually happens. When it remains a future hypothetical, it won't be accounted for.

fwiw 90% of software is reinventing the wheel. 80% of devs have an itch to "rewrite from scratch".

AI will deduplicate all of this

It might be a mistake to assume tomorrow’s training looks like today’s. Unsupervised learning is a thing and a very hot research topic, precisely because it avoids some of today’s big problems with acquiring the vast amounts of training data necessary.

It isn’t about training anymore. It is about harnesses.

Just look at new math proofs that will come out, as one example. Exploration vs Exploitation is a thing in AI but you seem to think that human creativity can’t be surpassed by harnesses and prompts like “generate 100 types of possible…”

You’re wrong. What you call creativity is often a manual application of a simple self-prompt that people do.

One can have a loop where AI generates new ideas, rejects some and ranks the rest, then prioritizes. Then spawns workloads and sandboxes to try out and test the most highly ranked ideas. Finally it accretes knowledge into a relational database.

Germans also underestimated USA in WW2, saying their soldiers were superior, and USA just had technology — but USA out produced tanks and machinery and won the war through sheer automation, even if its soldiers were just regular joes and not elite troops.

Back then it was mechanized divisions. Now it is mechanized intelligence.

While Stalin said: Quantity has a quality all its own.

Why would there be a lack of original ideas? People who are born to code so to speak will do it. Information wants to be free as the saying goes. It only takes one time for an innovation for it to be to copied everywhere.

We don’t need the same volume of developers to have the same or faster speed of innovation.

And conversely if there is stagnation there is a capital opportunity to out compete it and so there will be a human desire to do the work.

To;Dr. People like doing stuff and achieving. They will continue to do stuff.