Comment by Thanemate
11 hours ago
It makes sense for junior admins and junior platform engineers to leverage LLM's but I'd be highly skeptical for the future skillset of any junior software engineer who leverages LLM's right off the bat, unless we have already moved that goalpost.
Depends how they use them as arguably was the case with stack overflow or other resources in the past. E.g. an LLM can be a valid and useful way to start discovering or understanding code and architecture. You can ask for a summary , distill important concepts and then read in more detail about them.
Ya, this is the issue. LLMs are not great for developing minds. A lot like the internet presently, to be frank.
For fully developed and experienced minds, both can be useful.
You’re not wrong. You’re not the only one saying this either. Though, I’m currently of the mind that the concern is overblown. I’m finding Opus 4.6 is only really capable of solving a problem when the prompt explains the fix in such concrete detail that coding is incredibly straightforward. For example, if the prompt has enough detail that any decent human programmer would read it and end up writing basically the same code then Claude can probably manage it too.
While I haven’t used other models like Codex and Gemini all that much recently, Anthropic’s is one of the top-tier models, and so I believe the others are probably the same in this way.
A junior’s mind will not rot because the prompt basically has to contain detailed pseudocode in order to get anywhere.
Also, I have been called a bit of a hard-ass for this, but if the junior author of some piece of code is not able to explain to me why it is written that way or how they would extend it in a few reasonable cases, I consider that a problem.
This is orthogonal to both if it is well thought-out/naive/really strange code, or LLM generated/LLM assisted/hand written code. If there is a good understanding of the task and the goals behind it, the tools become secondary. If skills are lacking, it will end up a mess no matter the tools and it needs teaching.
Most of us could run stable servers with just ssh and vi. Would suck a lot though.