Comment by diggan

19 days ago

> using the comments by the seniors as training data for their next version

Yeah, I'm sure 100k comments with "Copilot, please look into this" and "The test cases are still failing" will massively improve these models.

Some of that seems somewhat strategic. With a junior you might do the same if you’re time pressured, or you might sidebar them in real life or they may come to you and you give more helpful advice.

Any senior dev at these organizations should know to some degree how LLMs work and in my opinion would to some degree, as a self protection mechanism, default to ambiguous vague comments like this. Some of the mentality is “if I have to look at it and solve it why don’t I go ahead and do it anyways vs having you do it” effort choices they’d do regardless of what is producing the PR. I think other parts of it is “why would I train my replacement, there’s no advantage for me here.”

  • Sidebar? With a junior developer making these mistakes over and over again, they wouldn't even make it past the probationary period in their employment contract.

    • I guess it depends on how you view and interact with other people. I tend to give people the benefit of the doubt that they’re doing their best to succeed. Why wouldn’t you want to help them as much as you reasonably can, unless they’re actively a terrible person?

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