4 ms·

I mostly share Josh's opinion, but I think a lot of these posts that talk about Senior vs. Junior experience when working with AIs is kind of rubbish. Sure, you

by snide 4mo ago

I mostly share Josh's opinion, but I think a lot of these posts that talk about Senior vs. Junior experience when working with AIs is kind of rubbish. Sure, you get better results as a Senior working with AI tooling and struggle more as a Junior. Nothing has changed in that equation except the amplification. What folks seem to avoid is that a Junior (in ANY subject) has the ability to LEARN so much faster with an AI research assistant, and that becoming an expert has accelerated for those with the personal stamina to dig deep (this as a requirement hasn't changed). I spend just as much time with my AI tooling asking questions as I do asking it to "build" or "fix" things. "How does this work?". "Can you suggest other tools?". I think some people always think about AI as an input / output relationship, when a lot of the time, the fiddling in between, with or without AI was always the important part. Yes people will suck in the beginning, against they always did. I think the good folks though will suck for a MUCH shorter time than I did getting into things. A lot of people will drop out and get discouraged. That happened before too. Learning things requires persistence. I think the only real case to be made is that AI's sense of immediate pleasure can neuter people away from running into friction. AI natives likely won't understand friction and question it.

JumpCrisscross 4mo ago
> a Junior (in ANY subject) has the ability to LEARN so much faster with an AI research assistant I’m not seeing this. And based on what we’re seeing at the university level, I’m not expecting to.
- sonofhans 4mo ago
  Yes, I agree, the skills are orthogonal. Digital typesetting is vastly quicker than manually putting down metal type, and since you’re exposed to more type you have the opportunity to learn faster. But getting good at typography with digital tools will help you very little if you need to lay out type manually.
  - JumpCrisscross 4mo ago
    > getting good at typography with digital tools will help you very little if you need to lay out type manually The analogy is unlimited typing in Gmail won’t make you a better writer or typesetter on its own.
- vanuatu 4mo ago
  I wonder how much of this is due to poor incentives at the university level? I've seen this work well at a job when there's a feedback loop for juniors that incentivized them to learn with more scope and compensation
  - judahmeek 4mo ago
    How did that business evaluate that the juniors were actually mastering concepts they had not known before?
    - vanuatu 4mo ago
      Mentorship & engaged managers
- keeda 4mo ago
  I think the key word is ability, and I fully agree with that. Using GenAI as a teaching aid can supercharge learning, especially as it makes it very easy to learn by doing. The problem is that people use GenAI to do and hence don't learn. (The preliminary research so far supports this: using AI to do the hard assignments produces poor learning outcomes, but using AI as a tutor, or even just for help with the hard assignments, produces slightly better learning outcomes.) I think what you're seeing is the effect of the incentives of the system. The system uses simplistic numbers like grades as proxies for actual learning, and these grades heavily influence students' job prospects, and so you're simply seeing Goodhart's Law in action. Given how easy current methods of skill assessment are to game with AI, my guess is the entire system has to be overhauled.
  - JumpCrisscross 4mo ago
    > using AI as a tutor, or even just for help with the hard assignments, produces slightly better learning outcomes Source? The few people I’ve seen try to do this wind up with a terrible understanding of the material, with large knowledge gaps and one or two fundamental fuckups. In every case, an introductory textbook would have been better. (It would also have been harder.)
    - keeda 4mo ago
      For coding specifically (there are many studies out there by now, but I know of these offhand): https://www.mdpi.com/2076-3417/14/10/4115 https://www.mdpi.com/2076-3417/14/10/4115 -- probably the earliest one of its kind, finds over-reliance degrades critical skills but supplementary use is mostly harmless. https://arxiv.org/html/2601.20245v2 https://arxiv.org/html/2601.20245v2 -- Anthropic's study, same as above except supplementary use (like clarifying concepts) can actually be beneficial. https://scale.stanford.edu/ai/repository/ai-meets-classroom-when-do-large-language-models-harm-learning https://scale.stanford.edu/ai/repository/ai-meets-classroom-... -- "Students who use LLMs as personal tutors by conversing about the topic and asking for explanations benefit from usage. However, learning is impaired for students who excessively rely on LLMs to solve practice exercises for them and thus do not invest sufficient own mental effort." Interestingly, they found simply disabling copy-paste on the chatbot interface resulted in better outcomes! Beyond coding, I recently came across this new meta-study; largely positive findings (which it admits may be biased) but does highlight evidence of negative effects of over-reliance: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2666920X25001699 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2666920X2... (Multiple studies find that the outcome depends on how AI is used. Surprisingly, incorrect guidance / unreliability / hallucinations appear to be a bigger problem than over-reliance! That could also explain poor performance in some cases.) My intuition, supported by these studies, is that as long as students are willing to do the hard cognitive work -- for which there is no substitute, really -- having LLM assistance is a boon. Which makes sense, it's comparable to having a tutor explain difficult concepts. This is why in my mind the real problem is that the incentives to use AI as a crutch are just too strong.
runarberg 4mo ago
> a Junior (in ANY subject) has the ability to LEARN so much faster with an AI research assistant This is a testable hypotheses with severe lack of citations. Intuition would argue the opposite. We learn by using our brains, if we offload the thinking to a machine and copy their output we don‘t learn. A child does not learn multiplication by using a calculator, and a language learner will not learn a new language by machine translating every sentence. In both cases all they’ve learnt is using a tool to do what they skipped learning.
- jononor 4mo ago
  As a precondition I think we have to assume that the person in question 1) wants to learn and 2) is smart enough to absorb new info and apply it and 3) reflects enough to adjust their approach when hitting bottlenecks or making mistakes 4) has a drive to create. Without these, self driven learning is not viable - and that has very little to do with AI. For such a person, I believe AI can be very empowering for learning. Like Google, wikipedia and stack overflow, Arxiv before it - AI tools give access to a lot of information. It allows to quickly dig deep into any topic you can imagine. And yes, the quality is variable - so one needs to find ways to filter and synthesize from imperfect info. But that was also the case before. Furthermore AI tools can be used to find holes in arguments or a paper. And by coding one can use it to test out things in practice. These are also powerful (albeit imperfect) learning tools. But they will not apply themselves.
  - runarberg 4mo ago
    Who is talking about self driven learning? Every workplace teachers their juniors how to do their job, and how to become better at their jobs. And as we are talking about junior developers it is safe to assume your conditions (1), (2), and (4) are all true, if any of them are false, then why did that person apply for and get a job as a junior developer? As for condition (3), all workplaces eventually hires a person who does not fulfill this, then they either fire that person, or they give them a talk and the developer grows out of it and changes their behavior to fulfill that condition. Aside: you listed 4 conditions for learning. I am not sure these are actually conditions recognized as such by behavior science. In fact, I doubt they are and that these conditions are just your opinions (man).
renticulous 4mo ago
There are other axes as well. Companies with AI will move faster than those without. AI itself could subsume what we collectively consider as Engineering Taste. AI is faster at what it does. So even if a junior costs less on his own than AI. Paying extra for AI means gaining first mover advantage.
- judahmeek 4mo ago
  > AI itself could subsume what we collectively consider as Engineering Taste. Only if AI feeds on more taste than garbage.
  - renticulous 4mo ago
    Harness Session data will be used for RL and that will inject taste into the models, perhaps??
xxs 4mo ago
> has the ability to LEARN so much faster with an AI research assistant, and that becoming an expert has accelerated for those with the personal stamina to dig deep (this as a requirement hasn't changed) If anything it allows to be as lazy as possible. I have not seen anyone digging deeper with the AI tools.
- qweiopqweiop 4mo ago
  If you decide to dig deeper, it's an incredible tool. Getting a summary of the internals of something you only use as an API, then getting it to test you on it until you understand. It really allows you to learn a lot.
- dmoose 4mo ago
  I have been having a blast going back through topics I learned in college and haven't used in years. Being able to rubber duck specific questions and follow a path based on what I remember vs don't is much faster with LLM than it would be with textbook. However, I'm doing this because it is personally fun. I'm guessing if presented with a task I wasn't interested in the LLM would create exactly the opposite outcome. Thankfully I'm at a point in my career where I don't have a lot of stuff forced on me externally so this hasn't come up, but I can picture teenage me taking a much lazier path with a much different end result.
justinhj 4mo ago
Smart, motivated juniors have incredible tools to amplify their learning and capabilities.
bluefirebrand 4mo ago
> that becoming an expert has accelerated for those with the personal stamina to dig deep (this as a requirement hasn't changed) This is a contradictory statement imo. Digging deep still takes the same amount of time it used to. AI accelerates the surface level (badly, tbh), it doesn't accelerate digging deep. Becoming an expert still takes time and effort, there really aren't shortcuts. To torture the Iron Man metaphor a bit. If you're not an expert without the AI, then you're not an expert with it.
lelanthran 4mo ago
> What folks seem to avoid is that a Junior (in ANY subject) has the ability to LEARN so much faster with an AI research assistant, You don't learn by reading, you learn by doing. In this case, simply reading the output of an LLM isn't going to substantially educate you.
- ok_dad 4mo ago
  You’re not as senior as you think if you think reading code isn’t worth it. Do you think novelists just write novels from nothing? They read books. Software developers need to read software, too. When was the last time you read the code for the best open source software in your industry? I routinely read the libraries I use.
  - deleted 4mo ago
    [deleted]
  - lelanthran 4mo ago
    > You’re not as senior as you think Classy. > if you think reading code isn’t worth it. I didn't say that. With anything you learn, sure, you need to read it, but you haven't actually learned it until you try to do it. As millions of teenagers find out in high school, it is not possible to "learn" trigonometry or calculus by reading the problems; they actually have to drill problems to pass. > Do you think novelists just write novels from nothing? They read books. Excellent example! Even with novelists, and professional authors, they only get better by writing. Face it - millions of people read just as much as (even more) than best selling authors, and yet those millions are unable to produce anything of note. > When was the last time you read the code for the best open source software in your industry? All the time; how else would I know that simply reading is not sufficient to learn something? I'm surprised that this point is even in contention; it is almost common knowledge that you can't learn from reading alone; it's the practice that results in learning, not the reading.
    - ok_dad 4mo ago
      You only said “You don't learn by reading” which I took literally what do you expect. I’m triggered by senior engineers who don’t read code, luckily you’re not one of them. Your original comment was terse as hell. Also, “classy.” As a phrase is about as “classy” as my original comment, so i guess we’re both passive aggressive jerks
djeastm 4mo ago
>I think the only real case to be made is that AI's sense of immediate pleasure can neuter people away from running into friction. AI natives likely won't understand friction and question it. This is key, I think, and gets overshadowed by people being offended by seeing bad vibecode or claims of 10x speeds, etc. The most important learning that happens is not when we ask and get the answer to our question right away. It's when we stretch ourselves to seek out the answer, fail a few times, think deeply, then perhaps after a nap, solve the problem. That kind of knowledge is priceless because it not only gets you an answer it gets you some errant paths you can use to avoid problems in future problem solving as well as getting you increased trust in your own thinking. If the next generations skip this step, they'll always think answers are supposed to be easy to find and will find themselves more and more dependent on AI and less and less confident in their own brains.
- bluefirebrand 4mo ago
  > If the next generations skip this step, they'll always think answers are supposed to be easy to find and will find themselves more and more dependent on AI and less and less confident in their own brains This seems like a very polite way of saying they will become less intelligent and less capable
ascotan 4mo ago
Actually i think AI makes junior devs dumber. Senior devs learned over the gigantic mountains of failed projects they've built. I still get people telling me to build flat file databases - nope. Build me a micro service architecture with 50+ lambdas - nope. Been there, done that. I know why you really shouldnt if you technically can. For me AI make me go 100 mph in the right direction. I see junior devs going 100 mph toward the ocean or into a wall. "lets use ai to build a chatbot in javascript that runs on my desktop that everyone can connect to with a claude skill!" ok buddy. Are they learning? maybe when they get pwned but what I see mostly is the cambrian explosion of bad ideas. What I see is junior devs that no longer understand what a reverse proxy is because AWS made us dumber. Junior devs that can't understand memory management because higher level languages made us dumber. AI is another link in that chain. 10 years from now pretty sure most devs won't be able to read code.
mpalmer 4mo ago
I don't see the juniors in my vicinity using these tools to learn. At all.

by snide 4mo ago

JumpCrisscross 4mo ago

> a Junior (in ANY subject) has the ability to LEARN so much faster with an AI research assistant I’m not seeing this. And based on what we’re seeing at the university level, I’m not expecting to.

sonofhans 4mo ago
Yes, I agree, the skills are orthogonal. Digital typesetting is vastly quicker than manually putting down metal type, and since you’re exposed to more type you have the opportunity to learn faster. But getting good at typography with digital tools will help you very little if you need to lay out type manually.
- JumpCrisscross 4mo ago
  > getting good at typography with digital tools will help you very little if you need to lay out type manually The analogy is unlimited typing in Gmail won’t make you a better writer or typesetter on its own.
vanuatu 4mo ago
I wonder how much of this is due to poor incentives at the university level? I've seen this work well at a job when there's a feedback loop for juniors that incentivized them to learn with more scope and compensation
- judahmeek 4mo ago
  How did that business evaluate that the juniors were actually mastering concepts they had not known before?
  - vanuatu 4mo ago
    Mentorship & engaged managers
keeda 4mo ago
I think the key word is ability, and I fully agree with that. Using GenAI as a teaching aid can supercharge learning, especially as it makes it very easy to learn by doing. The problem is that people use GenAI to do and hence don't learn. (The preliminary research so far supports this: using AI to do the hard assignments produces poor learning outcomes, but using AI as a tutor, or even just for help with the hard assignments, produces slightly better learning outcomes.) I think what you're seeing is the effect of the incentives of the system. The system uses simplistic numbers like grades as proxies for actual learning, and these grades heavily influence students' job prospects, and so you're simply seeing Goodhart's Law in action. Given how easy current methods of skill assessment are to game with AI, my guess is the entire system has to be overhauled.
- JumpCrisscross 4mo ago
  > using AI as a tutor, or even just for help with the hard assignments, produces slightly better learning outcomes Source? The few people I’ve seen try to do this wind up with a terrible understanding of the material, with large knowledge gaps and one or two fundamental fuckups. In every case, an introductory textbook would have been better. (It would also have been harder.)
  - keeda 4mo ago
    For coding specifically (there are many studies out there by now, but I know of these offhand): https://www.mdpi.com/2076-3417/14/10/4115 https://www.mdpi.com/2076-3417/14/10/4115 -- probably the earliest one of its kind, finds over-reliance degrades critical skills but supplementary use is mostly harmless. https://arxiv.org/html/2601.20245v2 https://arxiv.org/html/2601.20245v2 -- Anthropic's study, same as above except supplementary use (like clarifying concepts) can actually be beneficial. https://scale.stanford.edu/ai/repository/ai-meets-classroom-when-do-large-language-models-harm-learning https://scale.stanford.edu/ai/repository/ai-meets-classroom-... -- "Students who use LLMs as personal tutors by conversing about the topic and asking for explanations benefit from usage. However, learning is impaired for students who excessively rely on LLMs to solve practice exercises for them and thus do not invest sufficient own mental effort." Interestingly, they found simply disabling copy-paste on the chatbot interface resulted in better outcomes! Beyond coding, I recently came across this new meta-study; largely positive findings (which it admits may be biased) but does highlight evidence of negative effects of over-reliance: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2666920X25001699 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2666920X2... (Multiple studies find that the outcome depends on how AI is used. Surprisingly, incorrect guidance / unreliability / hallucinations appear to be a bigger problem than over-reliance! That could also explain poor performance in some cases.) My intuition, supported by these studies, is that as long as students are willing to do the hard cognitive work -- for which there is no substitute, really -- having LLM assistance is a boon. Which makes sense, it's comparable to having a tutor explain difficult concepts. This is why in my mind the real problem is that the incentives to use AI as a crutch are just too strong.

runarberg 4mo ago

> a Junior (in ANY subject) has the ability to LEARN so much faster with an AI research assistant This is a testable hypotheses with severe lack of citations. Intuition would argue the opposite. We learn by using our brains, if we offload the thinking to a machine and copy their output we don‘t learn. A child does not learn multiplication by using a calculator, and a language learner will not learn a new language by machine translating every sentence. In both cases all they’ve learnt is using a tool to do what they skipped learning.

jononor 4mo ago
As a precondition I think we have to assume that the person in question 1) wants to learn and 2) is smart enough to absorb new info and apply it and 3) reflects enough to adjust their approach when hitting bottlenecks or making mistakes 4) has a drive to create. Without these, self driven learning is not viable - and that has very little to do with AI. For such a person, I believe AI can be very empowering for learning. Like Google, wikipedia and stack overflow, Arxiv before it - AI tools give access to a lot of information. It allows to quickly dig deep into any topic you can imagine. And yes, the quality is variable - so one needs to find ways to filter and synthesize from imperfect info. But that was also the case before. Furthermore AI tools can be used to find holes in arguments or a paper. And by coding one can use it to test out things in practice. These are also powerful (albeit imperfect) learning tools. But they will not apply themselves.
- runarberg 4mo ago
  Who is talking about self driven learning? Every workplace teachers their juniors how to do their job, and how to become better at their jobs. And as we are talking about junior developers it is safe to assume your conditions (1), (2), and (4) are all true, if any of them are false, then why did that person apply for and get a job as a junior developer? As for condition (3), all workplaces eventually hires a person who does not fulfill this, then they either fire that person, or they give them a talk and the developer grows out of it and changes their behavior to fulfill that condition. Aside: you listed 4 conditions for learning. I am not sure these are actually conditions recognized as such by behavior science. In fact, I doubt they are and that these conditions are just your opinions (man).

renticulous 4mo ago

There are other axes as well. Companies with AI will move faster than those without. AI itself could subsume what we collectively consider as Engineering Taste. AI is faster at what it does. So even if a junior costs less on his own than AI. Paying extra for AI means gaining first mover advantage.

judahmeek 4mo ago
> AI itself could subsume what we collectively consider as Engineering Taste. Only if AI feeds on more taste than garbage.
- renticulous 4mo ago
  Harness Session data will be used for RL and that will inject taste into the models, perhaps??

xxs 4mo ago

> has the ability to LEARN so much faster with an AI research assistant, and that becoming an expert has accelerated for those with the personal stamina to dig deep (this as a requirement hasn't changed) If anything it allows to be as lazy as possible. I have not seen anyone digging deeper with the AI tools.

qweiopqweiop 4mo ago
If you decide to dig deeper, it's an incredible tool. Getting a summary of the internals of something you only use as an API, then getting it to test you on it until you understand. It really allows you to learn a lot.
dmoose 4mo ago
I have been having a blast going back through topics I learned in college and haven't used in years. Being able to rubber duck specific questions and follow a path based on what I remember vs don't is much faster with LLM than it would be with textbook. However, I'm doing this because it is personally fun. I'm guessing if presented with a task I wasn't interested in the LLM would create exactly the opposite outcome. Thankfully I'm at a point in my career where I don't have a lot of stuff forced on me externally so this hasn't come up, but I can picture teenage me taking a much lazier path with a much different end result.

justinhj 4mo ago

Smart, motivated juniors have incredible tools to amplify their learning and capabilities.

bluefirebrand 4mo ago

> that becoming an expert has accelerated for those with the personal stamina to dig deep (this as a requirement hasn't changed) This is a contradictory statement imo. Digging deep still takes the same amount of time it used to. AI accelerates the surface level (badly, tbh), it doesn't accelerate digging deep. Becoming an expert still takes time and effort, there really aren't shortcuts. To torture the Iron Man metaphor a bit. If you're not an expert without the AI, then you're not an expert with it.

lelanthran 4mo ago

> What folks seem to avoid is that a Junior (in ANY subject) has the ability to LEARN so much faster with an AI research assistant, You don't learn by reading, you learn by doing. In this case, simply reading the output of an LLM isn't going to substantially educate you.

ok_dad 4mo ago
You’re not as senior as you think if you think reading code isn’t worth it. Do you think novelists just write novels from nothing? They read books. Software developers need to read software, too. When was the last time you read the code for the best open source software in your industry? I routinely read the libraries I use.
- deleted 4mo ago
  [deleted]
- lelanthran 4mo ago
  > You’re not as senior as you think Classy. > if you think reading code isn’t worth it. I didn't say that. With anything you learn, sure, you need to read it, but you haven't actually learned it until you try to do it. As millions of teenagers find out in high school, it is not possible to "learn" trigonometry or calculus by reading the problems; they actually have to drill problems to pass. > Do you think novelists just write novels from nothing? They read books. Excellent example! Even with novelists, and professional authors, they only get better by writing. Face it - millions of people read just as much as (even more) than best selling authors, and yet those millions are unable to produce anything of note. > When was the last time you read the code for the best open source software in your industry? All the time; how else would I know that simply reading is not sufficient to learn something? I'm surprised that this point is even in contention; it is almost common knowledge that you can't learn from reading alone; it's the practice that results in learning, not the reading.
  - ok_dad 4mo ago
    You only said “You don't learn by reading” which I took literally what do you expect. I’m triggered by senior engineers who don’t read code, luckily you’re not one of them. Your original comment was terse as hell. Also, “classy.” As a phrase is about as “classy” as my original comment, so i guess we’re both passive aggressive jerks

djeastm 4mo ago

>I think the only real case to be made is that AI's sense of immediate pleasure can neuter people away from running into friction. AI natives likely won't understand friction and question it. This is key, I think, and gets overshadowed by people being offended by seeing bad vibecode or claims of 10x speeds, etc. The most important learning that happens is not when we ask and get the answer to our question right away. It's when we stretch ourselves to seek out the answer, fail a few times, think deeply, then perhaps after a nap, solve the problem. That kind of knowledge is priceless because it not only gets you an answer it gets you some errant paths you can use to avoid problems in future problem solving as well as getting you increased trust in your own thinking. If the next generations skip this step, they'll always think answers are supposed to be easy to find and will find themselves more and more dependent on AI and less and less confident in their own brains.

bluefirebrand 4mo ago
> If the next generations skip this step, they'll always think answers are supposed to be easy to find and will find themselves more and more dependent on AI and less and less confident in their own brains This seems like a very polite way of saying they will become less intelligent and less capable

ascotan 4mo ago

Actually i think AI makes junior devs dumber. Senior devs learned over the gigantic mountains of failed projects they've built. I still get people telling me to build flat file databases - nope. Build me a micro service architecture with 50+ lambdas - nope. Been there, done that. I know why you really shouldnt if you technically can. For me AI make me go 100 mph in the right direction. I see junior devs going 100 mph toward the ocean or into a wall. "lets use ai to build a chatbot in javascript that runs on my desktop that everyone can connect to with a claude skill!" ok buddy. Are they learning? maybe when they get pwned but what I see mostly is the cambrian explosion of bad ideas. What I see is junior devs that no longer understand what a reverse proxy is because AWS made us dumber. Junior devs that can't understand memory management because higher level languages made us dumber. AI is another link in that chain. 10 years from now pretty sure most devs won't be able to read code.

mpalmer 4mo ago

I don't see the juniors in my vicinity using these tools to learn. At all.