Comment by electronsoup
16 hours ago
> and they're just as capable as using AI as anyone
Wouldn't the assumption be the opposite, in that AI is magnifying the decision making of the engineer and so you get more payback by having the senior drive the AI?
I've found this to be true so far, junior engineers with AI can be super productive but they can also cause a lot of damage (more outages than ever) and AI amplifies the sometimes poorly designed code they can generate.
I suspect a lot of it best practices will be enforcing best practices via agents.md/claude.md to create a more constrained environment.
I’ve observed radically different workflows amongst senior candidates vs junior candidates when using an ai. A senior candidate will often build an extremely detailed plan for the agent - similar to how you would do a design for/with a junior engineer. Then let the agent go full throttle to implement the plan and review the result.
Juniors seem to split into the category of trust everything the ai says, or review every step of the implementation. It’s extremely hard to guide the ai while you are still learning the basics, opus4.6 is a very powerful model.
My observation has been that there are a lot of personal styles to engaging with the LLMs that work, and "hold the hand" vs "in-depth plan" vs "combination" doesn't really matter. There is some minimum level of engagement required for non-trivial tasks, and whether that engagement comes mid-development, at the early design phase, or after isn't really that big of a deal. Eg; "Just enough planning" is a fine way of approaching the problem if you're going to be in the loop once the implementation starts.
I don't claim to have any special skill at AI, but as a 'senior' dev, my strategy is exactly the opposite. I try to be as lazy, dumb and concise as I can bring myself to be with my initial prompt, and then just add more detail for the bits that the AI didn't guess correctly the first time around.
Quite often the AI guesses accurately and you save the time you'd have spent crafting the perfect prompt. Recently, my PM shared a nigh-on incompressible hand-scribbled diagram on Slack (which, in fairness, was more or less a joke). I uploaded it to Gemini with the prompt "WTF does this diagram mean?". Even without a shred of context, it figured out that it was some kind of product feature matrix and produced a perfect three paragraph summary.
I've never really seen the value in the planning phase as you're free to just throw away whatever the AI produces and try again with a different prompt. That said, I don't pay for my tokens at work. Is planning perhaps useful as a way of reducing total token usage?
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100% this. AI is automating the code generation.
Being able to clearly describe a problem and work with the AI to design a solution, prioritise what to put the AI to work on, set up good harnesses so the quality of the output is kept high, figure out what parallelises well and what’s going to set off agents that are stepping on each others toes… all of this needs experience and judgement and delegation and project organisation skills.
AI is supercharging tech leads. Beginners might be able to skill up faster, but they’re not getting the same results.
For a good senior, yes you get massive returns, which is why those good seniors are in incredibly high demand right now.
For average to low-performing intermediates/seniors... there's not much difference in output between them and a good junior at this point. Claude really raised the skill floor for software development.
My thinking is a bit different here: Seniors, even mediocre ones, already learned a lot of hard lessons by doing things pre-LLMs, even pre-SO. Those skills are valuable and I don't know how to train them into juniors.
I find it easier to get a reasonably smart senior to use AI in a good way, than to train a junior in what thinking to do, and what to outsource, learning basics about good design, robustness and risk analysis. The tools aren't the problem per se, it's more about how people use them. Bit of a slippery slope.
That's just my anecdotal experience from not a whole lot of data though. I think the industry will figure it out once things calm down a bit. Right now, I usually make the bet to get one senior rather than two juniors. Quite different to my strategy from a few years ago.
Yep. I've seen this personally. The ROI of a great engineer is bigger than ever.