5 ms·

you have 35 years of experience and have already built up the learning capability and general framework to acquire new knowledge. you know how to use agentic co

you have 35 years of experience and have already built up the learning capability and general framework to acquire new knowledge. you know how to use agentic coding as a tool to supplement your work. the juniors who start today don't have that, they overrely on agentic coding and do not know what they don't know

ookblah 6mo ago
someone probably made this same argument against certain frameworks over the years and juniors still figured it out. we need to stop trying to babysit learning for hypothetical situations. the bar to "start" is lower and the bar to actually competency is higher now, juniors who want to actually learn instead of just pressing enter over and over again will do so regardless of whatever you do to "help" them.
- SpicyLemonZest 6mo ago
  It's not really a hypothetical. I work with one junior who's submitted an incorrect bugfix 3 times and counting; he seems genuinely incapable of processing the idea that there's a correctness issue he has to resolve, rather than a prompt engineering issue that will allow Claude to figure it out if only he asks in the right way.
  - jfreds 6mo ago
    To be fair this was a thing before AI as well…
  - ookblah 6mo ago
    that's not the tooling's fault i feel. i've used LLMs to help explore and debug issues, point me to the right documentation to investigate, etc. I WISH i had something like this 30 years ago.
throwaway041207 6mo ago
IMO, by the time todays juniors would have 5-10 years of expected experience, the entire field will be something different altogether. Language choice distribution will collapse (if not change altogether), whole new modalities of monitoring and progressive delivery guardrails will come into play, essentially creating a 24/7 incremental rollout of pure agentic code, correctness will be determined by a mix of language features and self-monitoring by models in production and automated testing against production snapshots in pre-production, and deep debugging will the be province of a select group of engineers and there will be a pathway to those roles for juniors, but those roles will be coveted and difficult to break into (and probably will require education and maybe even informal accreditation).
- bulbar 6mo ago
  Just as "use code for contracts" failed for crypto currencies, "use AI output as prod" will fail for AI. Both is based on "just don't make catastrophic mistakes anymore". You also wrongly assume that requirements can always easily expressed as natural language. Another point: Software Engineering always starts where tooling capabilities stop. You don't get a competitive advantage by building without engineers what anybody everybody else can build without engineers.
  - throwaway041207 6mo ago
    > Just as "use code for contracts" failed for crypto currencies, "use AI output as prod" will fail for AI. Both is based on "just don't make catastrophic mistakes anymore". What I think will happen is AI will write code and it will do the best it can to mitigate mistakes prior to rollout, but once rollout time occurs, rollout will be incremental and it will self monitor by defining success conditions at rollout time. The nature of the code will mitigate "catastrophe" to a small group at worst, but most likely initial rollout will just run new versions of the code in a simulated context (language design could benefit from this) and analyze potential outcomes without affecting current functionality. But when the code goes live... it will be slowly scope changes progressively (think feature/experiment flags) and if it fails in the initial cohort, it will redirect. If success is positive, it will increase the rollout cohort. This is a normal software engineering practice today, but it's labor and process intensive when driven by humans. But in a world where humans are less involved, this process is scalable.
CGamesPlay 6mo ago
Exactly this. We need to be more precise than blanket statements like "agentic coding is a trap" and start figuring out what a "tasteful" application of agentic coding looks like. ChatGPT is destroying liberal arts curriculums because students can choose to not do anything of the thinking themselves and produce mediocre work that passes the bar. I think the same problem is showing itself with agentic coding, just with more directly measurable consequences (because the pile of software ends up failing in a more spectacular way than the pile of bad writing).
- hibikir 6mo ago
  On liberal arts is simply a matter of what the students want to get out of the class, vs what the teacher wants the students to do: There's a huge disconnect in goals and expectations, so there's no way for the teacher to actually win. The fact that there's such disconnect should give the departments pause. This doesn't happen at all for using agentic coding: What the programmer wants and what the boss wants are pretty well aligned. There are corner cases where someone isn't allowed to use LLMs, but does it anyway, but in most cases, the organization agrees.
  - CGamesPlay 6mo ago
    Honestly I'm not really thinking about the boss-programmer relationship, but rather the programmer-agent relationship. At best, you get what fnordpiglet is talking about, where it's a symbiotic relationship. On the other side of the coin, you get a parasitic relationship like the OP is talking about: the agent delivers results, you take credit, you fail to develop (or maintain) long-term skills, you become a non-value-adding middleman, you get replaced.
    - gaboAcosta 6mo ago
      To be fair, many people should be replaced. What is happening right now with layoffs in tech is that the overstaffing these organizations have been accruing across the last decade is staggering
  - cernocky 6mo ago
echelon 6mo ago
> the juniors who start today don't have that, they overrely on agentic coding and do not know what they don't know Y'all need to stop worrying about the kids. They're smarter than us and will run circles around us. They're going to look at us like dinosaurs and they're going to solve problems of scale and scope 10x or more than what we ever did. Hate to "old man yells at cloud" this, but so many people are falling into the trap because of personal biases. While the fear that "smartphones might make kids less computer literate" is true, that's because PCs are not as necessary as they once were. The kids that turn into engineers are fine and are every bit as capable.
- rimliu 6mo ago
  Was not a IQ decline observed for the first time recently? Also, no one gets smarter by outsourcing thinking.
  - echelon 6mo ago
    > Also, no one gets smarter by outsourcing thinking. Thinking is happening at a higher level. Humans are adepts at abstraction, and they are always capable of looking under the hood when needed. We've never had so much societal capability as now. And that's only going to accelerate. Smart people will use these tools effectively. Don't be so bearish on human ingenuity. Think of these tools as bullshit / busy work removers. You can focus on what matters and get more done than ever before. Deeper work, more connective work. It also opens fields of research up in an interdisciplinary fashion. People might explore outside of their limited domain now that they have help.
    - rimliu 6mo ago
      abstraction needs to be built on something. If there is little in your brain, there is little you can do with it.
      - echelon 6mo ago
        I think everyone's just citing platitudes at this point. The earth will move on. Smart people will continue to exist. I'll bet on the smart people.
danenania 6mo ago
If a junior builds something with agents that turns into a mess they can’t debug, that will teach them something. If they care about getting better, they will learn to understand why that happened and how to avoid it next time. It’s not all that different than writing code directly and having it turn into a mess they can’t debug—something we all did when we were learning to program. It is in many ways far easier to write robust, modular, and secure software with agents than by hand, because it’s now so easy to refactor and write extensive tests. There is nothing magical about coding by hand that makes it the only way to learn the principles of software design. You can learn through working with agents too.
- wiieee 6mo ago
  “Currently an engineer at OpenAI” Don’t forget to mention that.
- FridgeSeal 6mo ago
  > that will teach them something. If they care about getting better, This pre-supposes the idea that the business is _willing_ to let that happen, which is increasingly unlikely. The current, widespread attitude amongst stakeholders is “who cares, get the model to fix it and move on”. At least, when we wrote code by hand, needing to fix things by hand was a forcing function: one that now, from the business perspective, no longer exists.
  - danenania 6mo ago
    If it’s broken and the dev can’t debug it, the business won’t have much of a choice.
    - intrinsicallee 6mo ago
      There is a lot of space between broken and high quality that won't necessitate any business letting people "learn" on the job.
      - 6mo ago
jachauhan 6mo ago
[flagged]
bhagyeshsp 6mo ago
Self-taught, "junior" here. Due to English-language limitation my most adult life, I struggled to code. Used visual coding etc. But of course, I can't make a living on drag-and-drop harness. Comes in GPT-3.5, accelerated my learning. Now I'm running my incorporated company, just launched one software-hardware hybrid product. Second one is a micro-SaaS in closed beta. The point is: when people use "juniors" as a fixed shaped blobs of matter, they focus on the juniors that were in any case going to make mistakes: AI or not. Misses the key point of agentic usage.
- sterlind 6mo ago
  accelerated what learning? learning to code? learning to engineer? learning to manage? learning to market?
  - bhagyeshsp 6mo ago
    Learning the fundamentals of programming and their translation to code. I'm decent at engineering, managing and marketing solutions.
    - fatata123 6mo ago
      [dead]
  - lelanthran 6mo ago
    >> Comes in GPT-3.5, accelerated my learning. Now I'm running my incorporated company, just launched one software-hardware hybrid product. Second one is a micro-SaaS in closed beta. > accelerated what learning? learning to code? learning to engineer? learning to manage? learning to market? I'm pretty certain that you think you're talking to an owner of a business but you're actually talking to an AI-techbro whose "software-hardware hybrid product" and "incorporated company" has exactly zero revenue after it was prompted into existence in the hope that it will make some money before other people realise they could prompt the same thing for less.
    - 6mo ago
munksbeer 6mo ago
Juniors will figure out how to make things work just as well as we did. They may end up with a different set of skills, but competitive advantage is still a thing, and so competition will mean they end up with the best skills suited for the environment.
xnx 5mo ago
> they overrely on agentic coding and do not know what they don't know There's no better time to have a curious mind

ookblah 6mo ago

someone probably made this same argument against certain frameworks over the years and juniors still figured it out. we need to stop trying to babysit learning for hypothetical situations. the bar to "start" is lower and the bar to actually competency is higher now, juniors who want to actually learn instead of just pressing enter over and over again will do so regardless of whatever you do to "help" them.

SpicyLemonZest 6mo ago
It's not really a hypothetical. I work with one junior who's submitted an incorrect bugfix 3 times and counting; he seems genuinely incapable of processing the idea that there's a correctness issue he has to resolve, rather than a prompt engineering issue that will allow Claude to figure it out if only he asks in the right way.
- jfreds 6mo ago
  To be fair this was a thing before AI as well…
- ookblah 6mo ago
  that's not the tooling's fault i feel. i've used LLMs to help explore and debug issues, point me to the right documentation to investigate, etc. I WISH i had something like this 30 years ago.

throwaway041207 6mo ago

IMO, by the time todays juniors would have 5-10 years of expected experience, the entire field will be something different altogether. Language choice distribution will collapse (if not change altogether), whole new modalities of monitoring and progressive delivery guardrails will come into play, essentially creating a 24/7 incremental rollout of pure agentic code, correctness will be determined by a mix of language features and self-monitoring by models in production and automated testing against production snapshots in pre-production, and deep debugging will the be province of a select group of engineers and there will be a pathway to those roles for juniors, but those roles will be coveted and difficult to break into (and probably will require education and maybe even informal accreditation).

bulbar 6mo ago
Just as "use code for contracts" failed for crypto currencies, "use AI output as prod" will fail for AI. Both is based on "just don't make catastrophic mistakes anymore". You also wrongly assume that requirements can always easily expressed as natural language. Another point: Software Engineering always starts where tooling capabilities stop. You don't get a competitive advantage by building without engineers what anybody everybody else can build without engineers.
- throwaway041207 6mo ago
  > Just as "use code for contracts" failed for crypto currencies, "use AI output as prod" will fail for AI. Both is based on "just don't make catastrophic mistakes anymore". What I think will happen is AI will write code and it will do the best it can to mitigate mistakes prior to rollout, but once rollout time occurs, rollout will be incremental and it will self monitor by defining success conditions at rollout time. The nature of the code will mitigate "catastrophe" to a small group at worst, but most likely initial rollout will just run new versions of the code in a simulated context (language design could benefit from this) and analyze potential outcomes without affecting current functionality. But when the code goes live... it will be slowly scope changes progressively (think feature/experiment flags) and if it fails in the initial cohort, it will redirect. If success is positive, it will increase the rollout cohort. This is a normal software engineering practice today, but it's labor and process intensive when driven by humans. But in a world where humans are less involved, this process is scalable.

CGamesPlay 6mo ago

Exactly this. We need to be more precise than blanket statements like "agentic coding is a trap" and start figuring out what a "tasteful" application of agentic coding looks like. ChatGPT is destroying liberal arts curriculums because students can choose to not do anything of the thinking themselves and produce mediocre work that passes the bar. I think the same problem is showing itself with agentic coding, just with more directly measurable consequences (because the pile of software ends up failing in a more spectacular way than the pile of bad writing).

hibikir 6mo ago
On liberal arts is simply a matter of what the students want to get out of the class, vs what the teacher wants the students to do: There's a huge disconnect in goals and expectations, so there's no way for the teacher to actually win. The fact that there's such disconnect should give the departments pause. This doesn't happen at all for using agentic coding: What the programmer wants and what the boss wants are pretty well aligned. There are corner cases where someone isn't allowed to use LLMs, but does it anyway, but in most cases, the organization agrees.
- CGamesPlay 6mo ago
  Honestly I'm not really thinking about the boss-programmer relationship, but rather the programmer-agent relationship. At best, you get what fnordpiglet is talking about, where it's a symbiotic relationship. On the other side of the coin, you get a parasitic relationship like the OP is talking about: the agent delivers results, you take credit, you fail to develop (or maintain) long-term skills, you become a non-value-adding middleman, you get replaced.
  - gaboAcosta 6mo ago
    To be fair, many people should be replaced. What is happening right now with layoffs in tech is that the overstaffing these organizations have been accruing across the last decade is staggering
- cernocky 6mo ago

echelon 6mo ago

> the juniors who start today don't have that, they overrely on agentic coding and do not know what they don't know Y'all need to stop worrying about the kids. They're smarter than us and will run circles around us. They're going to look at us like dinosaurs and they're going to solve problems of scale and scope 10x or more than what we ever did. Hate to "old man yells at cloud" this, but so many people are falling into the trap because of personal biases. While the fear that "smartphones might make kids less computer literate" is true, that's because PCs are not as necessary as they once were. The kids that turn into engineers are fine and are every bit as capable.

rimliu 6mo ago
Was not a IQ decline observed for the first time recently? Also, no one gets smarter by outsourcing thinking.
- echelon 6mo ago
  > Also, no one gets smarter by outsourcing thinking. Thinking is happening at a higher level. Humans are adepts at abstraction, and they are always capable of looking under the hood when needed. We've never had so much societal capability as now. And that's only going to accelerate. Smart people will use these tools effectively. Don't be so bearish on human ingenuity. Think of these tools as bullshit / busy work removers. You can focus on what matters and get more done than ever before. Deeper work, more connective work. It also opens fields of research up in an interdisciplinary fashion. People might explore outside of their limited domain now that they have help.
  - rimliu 6mo ago
    abstraction needs to be built on something. If there is little in your brain, there is little you can do with it.
    - echelon 6mo ago
      I think everyone's just citing platitudes at this point. The earth will move on. Smart people will continue to exist. I'll bet on the smart people.

danenania 6mo ago

If a junior builds something with agents that turns into a mess they can’t debug, that will teach them something. If they care about getting better, they will learn to understand why that happened and how to avoid it next time. It’s not all that different than writing code directly and having it turn into a mess they can’t debug—something we all did when we were learning to program. It is in many ways far easier to write robust, modular, and secure software with agents than by hand, because it’s now so easy to refactor and write extensive tests. There is nothing magical about coding by hand that makes it the only way to learn the principles of software design. You can learn through working with agents too.

wiieee 6mo ago
“Currently an engineer at OpenAI” Don’t forget to mention that.
FridgeSeal 6mo ago
> that will teach them something. If they care about getting better, This pre-supposes the idea that the business is _willing_ to let that happen, which is increasingly unlikely. The current, widespread attitude amongst stakeholders is “who cares, get the model to fix it and move on”. At least, when we wrote code by hand, needing to fix things by hand was a forcing function: one that now, from the business perspective, no longer exists.
- danenania 6mo ago
  If it’s broken and the dev can’t debug it, the business won’t have much of a choice.
  - intrinsicallee 6mo ago
    There is a lot of space between broken and high quality that won't necessitate any business letting people "learn" on the job.
    - 6mo ago

jachauhan 6mo ago

[flagged]

bhagyeshsp 6mo ago

Self-taught, "junior" here. Due to English-language limitation my most adult life, I struggled to code. Used visual coding etc. But of course, I can't make a living on drag-and-drop harness. Comes in GPT-3.5, accelerated my learning. Now I'm running my incorporated company, just launched one software-hardware hybrid product. Second one is a micro-SaaS in closed beta. The point is: when people use "juniors" as a fixed shaped blobs of matter, they focus on the juniors that were in any case going to make mistakes: AI or not. Misses the key point of agentic usage.

sterlind 6mo ago
accelerated what learning? learning to code? learning to engineer? learning to manage? learning to market?
- bhagyeshsp 6mo ago
  Learning the fundamentals of programming and their translation to code. I'm decent at engineering, managing and marketing solutions.
  - fatata123 6mo ago
    [dead]
- lelanthran 6mo ago
  >> Comes in GPT-3.5, accelerated my learning. Now I'm running my incorporated company, just launched one software-hardware hybrid product. Second one is a micro-SaaS in closed beta. > accelerated what learning? learning to code? learning to engineer? learning to manage? learning to market? I'm pretty certain that you think you're talking to an owner of a business but you're actually talking to an AI-techbro whose "software-hardware hybrid product" and "incorporated company" has exactly zero revenue after it was prompted into existence in the hope that it will make some money before other people realise they could prompt the same thing for less.
  - 6mo ago

munksbeer 6mo ago

Juniors will figure out how to make things work just as well as we did. They may end up with a different set of skills, but competitive advantage is still a thing, and so competition will mean they end up with the best skills suited for the environment.

xnx 5mo ago

> they overrely on agentic coding and do not know what they don't know There's no better time to have a curious mind