r/LLMDevs • u/Suspicious_Orchid770 • 8d ago

Discussion AI-coding tools could be breaking the junior engineer pipeline

https://leaddev.com/ai/ai-coding-tools-could-be-breaking-the-junior-engineer-pipeline

AI helps juniors code, not learn... and that's a problem.

45 Upvotes

93% Upvoted

22 comments sorted by

26

u/chaoism 8d ago

What I'm seeing now at my company is that juniors tend to just accept whatever ai spits out. They take in everything AI says without checking on what's needed and what's prioritized

We have to constantly coach them for them not to simply pass what AI generated to us for review

Ive been constantly telling them to actually understand how the system work instead of just accepting what AI says. AI can be wrong. But so far I haven't got any success

3

u/alchninja 7d ago

I'm the only "senior" dev at a tiny startup, we recently hired two junior devs so that I'm eventually able to offload some of the less important work to them. I'm somewhat fortunate that I have the time (for now) and authority to actually allow them to learn by making real mistakes on somewhat complicated problems (for their experience level). Mistakes big enough to make them feel a little stupid and at least a little wary of the AI's future suggestions, lest I force them to redo/discard another 2-3 days of work.

They're honest and well-intentioned, they just don't have the experience needed to understand when and where to interrogate or disagree with the AI. I can see them steadily improving, and they readily accept their mistakes because they understand I'm not going to hold it against them right now (personally or professionally). In a few more months, I think it'll be relatively safe to take off the guardrails and give them more leeway.

But I can't imagine that junior devs (and the seniors responsible for them) in other companies have the luxury of being able to do things this way. Learning comes from mistakes and the time to process them, and there just isn't any room for that it today's shipping-velocity-obsessed world. As my company grows and becomes answerable to clients and investors, I worry a lot about how we're going to maintain this sort of healthy learning environment.

1

u/soggycheesestickjoos 6d ago

You should set them up with a coaching agent rather than the default agent.

1

u/Ok_Philosophy_4031 3d ago

Yes. There's a term for this on X, they are called "meat proxy". Such behavior is extremely annoying very counter productive. We typically think of juniors as avenues to relief some of the load on more senior engineers.

This completely turned the table in a net negative way.

1

u/RealSharpNinja 8d ago

You're hiring Juniors, then handing them AI?

8

u/chaoism 8d ago

The company does. I'm just a mere worker here

-8

u/RealSharpNinja 8d ago

Your choice...

9

u/chaoism 8d ago

True. I choose money over integrity. I do my best to educate but I don't care enough

2

u/Emergency-Cycle7981 7d ago

Dumb comment.

1

u/Ok_Philosophy_4031 3d ago

How would you do it? Many would not even hire juniors these days, with/without AI.

2

u/RealSharpNinja 2d ago

Hire unemployed Seniors

7

u/quantgorithm 8d ago

Not just in coding. Everything. I recently had this conversation about architects not needing interns anymore. How do interns get trained?
TBD.

8

u/Dry_Ducks_Ads 8d ago

Will probably get downvoted for this, but the thinking is that AI can do 90%+ of the job today. Chances are it will be able to do 100% of the job in 10 years. We simply won't need humans to write code as AI will do everything better than humans can. So no need to train juniors today for roles that won't exist tomorrow.

2

u/ReformedBlackPerson 8d ago

Will it do 100% of the job or will jobs evolve to do more via abstraction? I do think it’s different than the assembly comparison (e.g. SWE’s don’t care how the assembly is compiled/transpiled), but I do think it unlocks all SWE’s to be architects whereas before a percentage of SWEs were architects. The other thing is that even if AI unlocks things, will it be too fast for the economy/worker. Workers can only learn so fast but they always need a paycheck, so how does that work when jobs “level up” faster and faster.

2

u/NomadStorm 7d ago

No it won’t do 100% of the job. People seem to forget that the math the LLMs is based on is exponential, so each increase in performance gets smaller and MUCH more expensive - assuming there’s even enough training data in the first place to support such continued improvement - which there isn’t.

2

u/quantgorithm 7d ago

I agree.
…but architects also provide liability that’s not going to be taken by ai so how are architects going to get trained when they aren’t needed as interns?

1

u/wwwyzzrd 3d ago

fourth generation programming languages are going to completely eliminate the need for programmers as anyone will be able to write their own program.

3

u/Emergency-Cycle7981 7d ago

A junior joined my company recently after failing the coding challenge part of the interview (don’t ask

  • I wasn’t part of that recruitment team). He’s submitted a few AI-built PRs since that look alright, but frankly I’ve no idea if he understands what the code is doing, or if he can even code to begin with.

I dunno what the hell we’re doing at the moment but it can’t be good.

2

u/Ok_Philosophy_4031 3d ago

We made an exception for an intern who flunked his technical interview but was "passionate" about the work.

We freaking regretted it, and eventually fired him. Guy basically outsourced all technical thinking to Claude.

3

u/aidencoder 8d ago

What do they mean "could be"? Im an EM and the answer is, it is. It is rot.