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Maybe a contrary opinion, but who cares if they use AI? We shouldn't expect juniors to use a different / artificially handicapped workflow than the rest of us.

Maybe a contrary opinion, but who cares if they use AI? We shouldn't expect juniors to use a different / artificially handicapped workflow than the rest of us. Test them on the actual work, whatever it is. Make multiple example questions or one big take home project that's similar to the real work they'd be doing, and allow them to solve it organically, as they would on the job. If they pass it with AI, cool, they managed to use it effectively. If they fail it with AI, that's on them. You don't need to go out of your way to purposely try to confuse AI OR the human. Working together is going to be the new norm and the AI is just another assistant or teammate. IMO you're not testing "is this person super smart and able to recite leet code from memory without any internet access or reference materials". You're testing "is this person going to work well in our team and contribute meaningfully". You wouldn't disrespect your current coworkers by asking "how much AI did you use in this PR" if it otherwise works and passes tests and seems readable and maintainable, etc. (and if it doesn't, that's a code quality concern, not a question of human vs AI provenance). The juniors should have the same ability to use the tooling available to the rest of us. If they choose to never understand AI output more deeply, well, the same could be said of any third party lib or Stack post. It's usually not a deal breaker in run of the mill business apps anyway. In fact there's an argument to be made for adopting good enough popular solutions vs reinventing the wheel and adding more tech debt for minimal gains.

sircastor 2y ago
> We shouldn't expect juniors to use a different / artificially handicapped workflow than the rest of us. When I was at film school, our first year project was required to be done on film. This was 2001 - Digital cameras were newish, but the school had several that students could use. The reason they required film had to do with the students. Film is expensive, and unforgiving. You need lots of light, you have to cut and tape it together by hand. It makes you slow down and think about what you’re doing and why. AI is a tool, but developers need to understand their work without it. I think it dangerously enables development without thinking.
- jjice 2y ago
  I've seen this kind of take get a lot of hate online, but I do agree (ignoring any of the parent post's specifics). I think using AI is fine, but if you get output and you don't have the ability to validate it or look at it critically, you're just going to produce code with subtle bugs. I worked with a junior at my last job - great guy - who really got into ChatGPT when it came out. There we're _multiple_ times I hopped in a call to debug with him or reviewed a PR of his and had questions about certain very clear bugs. They were always AI generated, but unvalidated. One specific one that pops out was an htaccess file (which suck, to be fair). He was asked my why his changes didn't work as he wanted them to, and when I looked at it, it wasn't even close to doing what was intended. I asked him where he got the basis for these changes, and he pulled up a ChatGPT prompt. I understand that an LLM likely has very little htaccess knowledge compared to JavaScript, but the mindset of taking what it said and pasting it in without assessment isn't a very productive one. Same goes with StackOverflow as well, except you can at least get some feedback from other people via votes and comments. He also had a lot of imposter syndrome, and I can't imagine that relying on LLMs helped much with that either.
- smeej 2y ago
  This reminds me of the arguments against teaching kids to use calculators in school, at least at the elementary ages. Yes, it's now probably safe to assume they will have one in their pockets their whole lives, but understanding the principles of what's actually happening is still important for the student's personal growth in understanding of the subject.
  - sky2224 2y ago
    I know you're on the side of discouraging AI tools (at least that's how I'm interpreting your response), I just want to highlight that I think the calculator argument is different than the AI one. Yes, they're both new tools here, but the calculator argument didn't have the caveat of sometimes 2+2 won't output 4. LLM tools do have that issue and it's important that junior devs don't overlook this and are able to function on their own.
    - 2y ago

sircastor 2y ago

> We shouldn't expect juniors to use a different / artificially handicapped workflow than the rest of us. When I was at film school, our first year project was required to be done on film. This was 2001 - Digital cameras were newish, but the school had several that students could use. The reason they required film had to do with the students. Film is expensive, and unforgiving. You need lots of light, you have to cut and tape it together by hand. It makes you slow down and think about what you’re doing and why. AI is a tool, but developers need to understand their work without it. I think it dangerously enables development without thinking.

jjice 2y ago
I've seen this kind of take get a lot of hate online, but I do agree (ignoring any of the parent post's specifics). I think using AI is fine, but if you get output and you don't have the ability to validate it or look at it critically, you're just going to produce code with subtle bugs. I worked with a junior at my last job - great guy - who really got into ChatGPT when it came out. There we're _multiple_ times I hopped in a call to debug with him or reviewed a PR of his and had questions about certain very clear bugs. They were always AI generated, but unvalidated. One specific one that pops out was an htaccess file (which suck, to be fair). He was asked my why his changes didn't work as he wanted them to, and when I looked at it, it wasn't even close to doing what was intended. I asked him where he got the basis for these changes, and he pulled up a ChatGPT prompt. I understand that an LLM likely has very little htaccess knowledge compared to JavaScript, but the mindset of taking what it said and pasting it in without assessment isn't a very productive one. Same goes with StackOverflow as well, except you can at least get some feedback from other people via votes and comments. He also had a lot of imposter syndrome, and I can't imagine that relying on LLMs helped much with that either.
smeej 2y ago
This reminds me of the arguments against teaching kids to use calculators in school, at least at the elementary ages. Yes, it's now probably safe to assume they will have one in their pockets their whole lives, but understanding the principles of what's actually happening is still important for the student's personal growth in understanding of the subject.
- sky2224 2y ago
  I know you're on the side of discouraging AI tools (at least that's how I'm interpreting your response), I just want to highlight that I think the calculator argument is different than the AI one. Yes, they're both new tools here, but the calculator argument didn't have the caveat of sometimes 2+2 won't output 4. LLM tools do have that issue and it's important that junior devs don't overlook this and are able to function on their own.
  - 2y ago