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Comment by whatevsmate | Hacker News Reader

Wow a lot of the stories people are writing here are super depressing. If a junior developer is delivering you a pile of code that doesn’t work, hasn’t been manually tested and verified by them, hasn’t been carefully pared down to its essential parts, and doesn’t communicate anything about itself either through code style, comments or docs … then you are already working with an LLM ; it just so happens to be hosted in - or parsed thru - a wetware interface. Critical thinking and taking responsibility for the outcome is the real job and always has been.

And, cynically, I bet a software LLM will be more responsive to your feedback than the over-educated and overpaid junior “engineer” will be. Actually I take it back, I don’t think this take is cynical at all.

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People think juniors submitting LLM-generated code to seniors to review is a sign of how bad LLM is.

I see it as a sign of how bad juniors are, and the need of seniors interacting with LLM directly without the middlemen.

The main problem in this environment is IMO: how does a junior become a senior, or even a bad junior become a good junior. People aren't learning fundamentals anymore beyond what's taught, and all the rest of 'trade knowledge' is now never experienced, people just trust that the LLM has absorbed it sufficiently. Engineering is all about trade-offs. Failing to understand why from 10 possible ways of achieving something, 4 are valid contenders and possible 1-2 are best in the current scenario, and even the questions to ask to get to that answer, is what makes a senior.

The LLM is the coding tool, not the arbiter of outcome.

A human’s ability to assess, interrogate, compare, research, and develop intuition are all skills that are entirely independent of the coding tool. Those skills are developed through project work, delivering meaningful stuff to someone who cares enough to use it and give feedback (eg customers), making things go whoosh in production, etc etc.

This is a XY problem and the real Y are galaxy brains submitting unvalidated and shoddy work that make good outcomes harder rather than easier to reach.

I think the solution becomes clearer - juniors need to worry less about knowing how to program in a void, since the LLM can handle most of that, but care more about how to produce code that doesn't break things, that doesn't have unintended 2nd order effects, that doesn't add unneeded complexity, etc.

In my experience I see juniors come out of college who can code in isolation as well as me or better. But the difference between jr/sr is much more about integration, accuracy and simplicity than raw code production. If LLMs remove a lot of the hassle of code production I think that will BENEFIT the other elements, since those things will be much more visible.

Personally, I think juniors are going to start emerging with more of a senior mindset. If you don't have to sweat uploading tons of programming errata to your brain you can produce more code abd more quickly need to focus on larger structural challenges. That's a good thing! Yes, they will break large codebases but they have been soing that forever, if given the chance. The difference now is they will start doing that much sooner.

LLMs are so easy to use though, it's addictive. Even as a senior I find myself asking LLMs stuff I know I should be looking up online instead.

I use LLMs to code. I think they’re great tools and learning the new ropes has been fun as hell. Juniors should use them too. But any claim that the LLM is responsible for garbage code being pushed into PRs is misreading the actual state of play imo.

Why look it up online when good results are buried under ads and the websites themselves are choked with astroturfed content. The exception is when libraries have good documentation.

We're in an environment where management is demanding the staff use these tools. The junior staff is going to listen to the CEO.

Why should a Jr dev NOT use an LLM? Its the skill of the future, its even an underlying plank in your argument!

Jr Devs are responding to incentives to learn how to LLM, which we are saying all coders need to.

So now we have to torture the argument to create a carve out for junior devs - THEY need to learn critical thinking and taking responsibility.

Using an LLM directly reduces your understanding of whatever you used it write, so you can't have both - learning how to code, and making sure your skills are future proof.

Nothing I wrote is in counterpoint to this.

There’s no carve out. Anyone pushing thoughtless junk in a PR for someone else to review is eschewing responsibility.

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