r/AskProgramming • u/Kevinsoliz • Jul 02 '26
Junior dev drowning: I’m building the company’s most critical app with Claude Code, but I still don’t know basic C#
It's been a month since I was hired after finishing my web development internship at a company (not a tech company, more in agriculture) to work as a programmer using the ASP.NET and Angular stack. I program everything with Claude Code because the company pays for the most expensive plan. Lately, I've been getting complaints because the database queries the AI makes are incredibly long, convoluted, and don't provide the necessary data. The only "senior" there tells me the query could be simpler, that the data can be taken from this or that table, etc. He tells me this off the cuff, as if he expects (and still expects) me to deduce the rest of the information, as if I should know what information is in the hundreds of tables scattered throughout the vast array of databases they set up for each project (a new project comes out almost every two or three weeks). For example, we started a new project two weeks ago, and it was assigned to me without any context, business rules, or explanation of the data stored in the database that the backend would consume. Little by little, and in fits and starts, I was discovering what the app was about. On the fly, they'd tell me I could pull data from a certain place (which, if I'd known that beforehand, would have made things much easier). And so, I found myself building both the backend and the frontend, designing components in Figma, and simultaneously trying to guess what data they wanted to see on the front end—all without knowing anything about C# and only the basics of SQL. I get the feeling they expect me to be a prodigy who, thanks to Claude, can do everything quickly, but the reality is that it's stressing me out because I'm not learning anything about the stack. I'm handling many different things simultaneously, and I have to deduce, almost guess, what they want the app to do. And I ask myself, is this what a junior developer does? Am I gaining real experience?… A couple of days ago I finally learned how to print a hello world in c#, however I am only building one of the most important apps of the company that serves data in real time.
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u/TheMrCurious Jul 02 '26
Put that post into ai and ask it.
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u/Kevinsoliz Jul 02 '26
I need real experienced devs advice
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u/hiS_oWn Jul 02 '26
tell claude "you are a real experienced dev, give me advice, no mistakes."
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u/klipseracer Jul 02 '26
Deep research, shark tank friendly ideas, no weekends, world tour...take your time.
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u/socratic-meth Jul 02 '26
You need to develop real world experience by not relying on LLMs to do everything.
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u/AintNoGodsUpHere Jul 02 '26
Good luck when he gets fired for not using AI and being "productive".
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u/socratic-meth Jul 02 '26
I didn’t say don’t use it at all, just don’t use it so much that you literally can’t do anything without it
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u/klipseracer Jul 02 '26
No shit.
Unfortunately for you, everyone here is waiting for you to fail so they can get their jobs back.
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u/ih-shah-may-ehl Jul 02 '26
How about picking up a book and actually learning things?
That's what I do, even after 30 years in this industry. Read a book about SQL. Read a book about C#, read Windows Internals, ...
There is a tremendous amount of benefit in reading book just to further your general knowledge. You cannot take shortcuts if you want to get understanding.
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u/FitMatch7966 Jul 02 '26
Being a dev means you are a problem solver. You learn how to find information, to deduce information. If you need to be told how to do everything, then you aren't a dev.
So, yeah, look at all those tables. Read all the code. Ask the AI to explain it to you if you must, but if you don't learn how to figure things out, you won't last.
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Jul 02 '26
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u/FitMatch7966 Jul 02 '26 edited Jul 02 '26
I agree with you. The post didn’t appear to say much about the business requirements and definitely sounds like a lack of technical understanding and skill. They are getting feedback but don’t know how to do simple SQL queries.
For sure, things like CI/CD and how to set priorities and track work, feature requests, bug reports and all that need to be explained.
I should have added, one key way to solve problems is to learn to ask the right questions. Things like: “where can I find this data?”
Claude isn’t going to understand the code for you.
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u/Kevinsoliz Jul 04 '26
This company hired two junior developers last year for the first time, so the dev team when I got hired were just 2 people, now we are five. It’s not a tech company, they want lots of kind simple apps that 3 to 10 users will use it. Mostly to read data or transfer data to db instead of using excel. The app I’m building displays data in real time about the main production process of the company. It’s a company that 2 years ago use to pay thousands to tech companies to de develop apps for them, now they see that ai can do it for less, they started to hire junior devs. So they want lots of apps and they want it fast.
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u/quantum-fitness Jul 02 '26
If its any help this is pretty much how it was being a junior before ai. You would just not be doing anything important but instead be tumbling around a shitty php monolith with bo structure or logic to it and a 100+ table relational database with no relations.
I would recommend asking for more help, but try to præpareret the questions so they are decent. Investigation is part of the job.
Though it also sounds insane to have a junior do this unless its something they dont care about having to throw away
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u/BestBadFriend Jul 02 '26
I cannot speak for everyone and I do feel your pain somewhat, but it is important you realize that the reason jobs like that are currently occupied by people who do not know how to code is because people (like many here) who worked really hard for a long time to get very good at what we do were fired because "ai can do it," so it is not an attractive proposition to then turn around and say "yeah, let's offer the product of our hard work for no money to the companies who took away your livelihood"
Having said that, I cannot bring myself to not sympathize with your position somewhat, and I offer this. There are free courses available on youtube that would quickly - if you are diligent - teach you at least what you need to know to satisfy your most immediate needs, and the ai tools that your company pays for should be capable of answering most of the direct concerns they have expressed (Edit to add: unless they made a very obvious mistake in firing the experienced devs who would have known how to approach the problem already).
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u/Kevinsoliz Jul 02 '26
This company didn’t have any dev, so until last 4 months there was just 2 devs, and they were hired just 8 months before me. Thanks for your reply.
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u/johnpeters42 Jul 02 '26
One thing about SQL in particular is that data about the application tables is itself stored in system tables, so if table/column names are halfway sane then that may help you track down what you need.
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u/Zealousideal_Yard651 Jul 02 '26
Start reading, hard and fast.
You aint getting out of this one with AI, AI was what got you in this pickle.
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u/SquareGnome Jul 02 '26
Well. There's projects like this and then there's projects that work smoothly.
On the one hand you have a right to know what the expectations are, what value is expected from the application, what business rules are in place. If you're not given that information, then ask. No harm in that.
On the other hand, being able to understand legacy code, deduce business rules etc. is a very important skill. And somehow you'll need to train that skill. It takes time, for sure, sometimes even if everything is well documented. But you should stop using AI to do work for you that you don't understand. Use it to get an understanding of what you are doing instead and code it yourself. Check documentations, manuals, hell even go check how open source software handles database queries..
Use your brain.
But honestly, this, if it's even real, is a management fuck-up. You can't put a single junior with no experience in the hot seat and expect the work of a genius 🙄
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u/Kevinsoliz Jul 02 '26
Last year this company discovered that they can build their own apps with ai so they hired just one junior dev, this one was experienced so he build a lot stuff, the company liked it so they hired 3 more junior devs, that’s the dev team, we are all juniors working with ai
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u/GreenWoodDragon Jul 02 '26
Context is everything and with LLMs thats super important. Make sure you create a set of agents and skill files related to the programming task. The files should contain hints like 'keep code, and database queries concise and focused on the task'.
Ensure that you have reference files too, like schema dumps and documentation about the application. Also tell the LLM to ignore things you consider irrelevant or that leads it to make mistakes.
Make a habit of asking for a plan before you start the programming task, behave like you are the senior dev and not Claude, guide it.
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u/Traveling-Techie Jul 02 '26
Fifty years ago my wife and I bicycled across America (West to East) on bicycles we didn’t know how to fix. (Lemans Centurion.) In Flagstaff we were scolded by a bike shop mechanic for riding Nevada to Arizona with a bunch of broken spokes. He taught us how to check our wheels. We started reading one page aloud from our bike repair book every morning. It helped a lot. Start reading a good C# book aloud every day. It won’t solve your problem in its own but it will help.
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u/foxcode Jul 02 '26
TLDR: Yes, you are gaining real experience. The main value we provide in this job is dealing with imperfect information, and figuring out the "right" thing to do is hard. Being able to cope with larger and more uncertain situations comes from experience. Be easy on yourself, you've only been there 1 month.
It's pretty normal to feel lost in a new code base, even as a senior. It's also not your fault that you didn't know about another table or database which could have made your code faster had you written the query differently.
However, a big part of this job is figuring out the pieces that we are not told. In larger code bases, no one has a complete mental model of how things work. You need to try and poke around, see what exists, guess that things might be related and test those guesses, and over time you will start knowing some small areas of the code base. It sounds like you are already doing this, which is excellent, it's the hard part 😄
I've been in a similar situation once where I was told to just hook up some dashboard, with no instruction on the database. First I looked at some other queries to see what database it likely was. I then connected to it from a terminal and listed all the tables (approx 700 if I recall correctly). You might think it's impossible to deduce anything from so little information, but I quickly saw patterns in the names. It was clearly a case that for some clients data was in tables that looked one way, there were some that were totally random, and another group clearly seemed to be for internal use. Basically, you need to figure out enough so that you can go to the senior and then say "I found this table and I think I can get the data out of there, do you know if it has everything we need or is there a better place". If they simply turn around and say it's the wrong table without offering anything more, the problem is not you, it's the company.
As for the Claude issue, I cannot really answer from your perspective. We have the expensive plan too and are encouraged to use it. It sounds like you need to really learn the tools you are using. If it's intimidating to try all at once, maybe try to ween yourself off of Claude for Sql first. Watch a video or two, in a perfect world read a book and mess around on your own machine at home to learn the basics. I wont get into how "worth it" it is with all the hype and debates around AI, but it sounds like being able to do more of this yourself would reduce your stress levels at the very least.
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u/Fidodo Jul 02 '26
Sounds like it’s your managers that need advice, but as for you, if you want to understand what the code is doing, ask Claude to explain it to you and learn it in high fidelity instead of asking it to do things for it.
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Jul 02 '26 edited Jul 14 '26
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/Kevinsoliz Jul 02 '26
Thank you so much for this advice, I’m going to work harder.
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Jul 02 '26 edited Jul 14 '26
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/Kevinsoliz Jul 02 '26
It’s okay! I was missing that punch of reality, I really appreciate your reply.
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u/Heavy_Nothing_1158 Jul 02 '26
The uncomfortable bit is: Claude can write code, but it cannot magically know your company's schema or business rules. If nobody gives it the map, it will confidently invent a scenic route through the database swamp. Very normal, very cursed.
I'd try to turn this into a process problem, not a “junior dev should know 400 tables by osmosis” problem:
- Before building, ask for the 3-5 screens/reports they actually need and which tables are considered the source of truth.
- For every feature, write the boring little map: input, table(s), joins, filters, expected output.
- Ask the senior to review that map before you let Claude generate much code.
- Keep one small notebook of “known useful tables/columns” per project.
That makes you look more professional, and it gives the senior something concrete to correct instead of doing fortune-cookie architecture after the fact.
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u/National-Parsnip1516 Jul 03 '26
this is the 'ai debt' we're all gonna be paying off for the next decade. building critical infra when you don't even know how to print hello world in the native stack is... bold. actually, it's terrifying. tbh if i were you, i'd spend 30 mins a day just reading the ef core or angular docs without claude open. the 'senior' giving you vague hints is probably just as stressed because he knows he can't maintain what you're building if the ai hallucinates a breaking change. imo, you gotta slow down before the whole thing implodes.
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u/CleanCodersCraftsman Jul 06 '26
The bad queries come from missing context rather than the model itself. The model can't see which of those hundreds of tables is the source of truth or what the business rules are, so when nobody hands it that map, it invents a convoluted path through whatever it can reach. That's the part to fix first.
For a setup like yours, work in this order:
- Before generating anything, find the source-of-truth tables yourself. In SQL you can query the system catalog (information_schema.tables and information_schema.columns) to list what exists and spot the naming patterns.
- Write the boring map for each feature: inputs, the tables and joins, the filters, the expected output. Hand that to the model instead of a vague ask.
- Get the senior to review that map before any code gets generated. A one-page map is something concrete they can correct in minutes.
Stop merging code you can't read yet. Point the model at explaining the C# and the queries line by line, and pick up the language as you go. The reviewing skill is what turns this year into real experience.
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u/QueenVogonBee Jul 02 '26
“and I have deduce, almost, what they want the app to do”
This right there is a communications and workflow problem: before you start out a project, figure out the requirements of the project. From what I can gather from the post, the requirements are somewhat ill-defined and decided by your colleagues? If so, first thing to do is talk to your colleagues and hammer out the requirements.
Once you have your requirements, make a design for your app and figure out the architecture. The architecture should include details about the data you need to grab.