Comment by tptacek
3 days ago
I don't know why people don't give more credence to the argument that the exact opposite thing will happen.
3 days ago
I don't know why people don't give more credence to the argument that the exact opposite thing will happen.
Right. I don’t understand why everyone thinks this will make it impossible for junior devs to learn. The people I had around to answer my questions when I was learning knew a whole lot less than Claude and also had full time jobs doing something other than answering my questions.
Junior devs using AI can get a lot better at using AI and learn those existing patterns it generates, but I notice, for myself, that if I let AI write a lot of the code I remember and thereby understand it later on less well. This applies in school and when trying to learn new things but the act of writing down the solution and working out the details yourself trains our own brain. I'd say that this has been a practice for over a thousand years and I'm skeptical that this will make junior devs grow their own skills faster.
I think asking questions to the AI for your own understanding totally makes sense, but there is a benefit when you actually create the code versus asking the AI to do it.
I'm sure there is when you're just getting your sea legs in some environment, but at some point most of the code you write in a given environment is rote. Rote code is both depleting and mutagenic --- if you're fluent and also interested in programming, you'll start convincing yourself to do stupid stuff to make the code less rote ("DRY it up", "make a DSL", &c) that makes your code less readable and maintainable. It's a trap I fall into constantly.
4 replies →
It won't make it impossible for junior engineers to learn.
It will simply reduce the amount of opportunities to learn (and not just for juniors), by virtue of companies' beancounters concluding "two for one" (several juniors) doesn't return the same as "buy one get one free" (existing staff + AI license).
I dread the day we all "learn from AI". The social interaction part of learning is just as important as the content of it, really, especially when you're young; none of that comes across yet in the pure "1:1 interaction" with AI.
I learnt programming on my own, without any social interaction involved. In fact, I loved programming because it does not involve any social interaction.
Programming has become more of a "social game" in the last 15 years or so. AI is a new superpower for people like me, bringing balance to the Force.
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You learn by doing.. eg typing the code. It's not just knowledge, it's the intuition you develop when you write code yourself. Just like physical exercise. Or playing an instrument. It's not enough to know the theory, practice is key.
AI makes it very easy to avoid typing and hence make learning this skill less attractive.
But I don't necessarily see it as doom and gloom, what I think will happen - juniors will develop advanced intuition about using AI and getting the functionality they need, not the quality of the code, while at the same time the AI models will get increasingly better and write higher quality code.
If a junior engineer ships a similar repo to this with the help of AI, sure, I'll buy that.
But as of now, it's senior engineers who really know what they 're doing who can spot the errors in AI code.
Hold on. You said "really know what they're doing". Yes, I agree with that. What I don't buy is the coupling of that concept with "seniority".
Have a better term for "knows what they're doing" other than senior?
8 replies →
If I’ve learned anything from the past few decades, something completely unexpected and even weirder than both will happen.