[spencerchubb]

How much experience does your junior dev have? Do they have a CS degree and have they done internships before? I am in college and looking at my peers, I can tell you that just having a degree does not mean they can code.

Maybe a controversial answer, but tell the junior dev to use ChatGPT.

[hibernator149]

Please be cautious with this approach. Good juniors will benefit from this. But the bad devs and students I worked with just copied code from others without understanding or learning from it. You might just introduce an unreliable middleman between yourself and the LLM this way, benefitting nobody.

[spencerchubb]

Good point. ChatGPT should be used strategically

[McNutty]

GPT or Copilot

Take this comment with a massive pinch of salt as I'm not a dev, just a sysadmin who does some scripting, and I've learned a ton already from asking ChatGPT to "refactor this function".

One of my colleagues had paid for Copilot out of his own pocket, and the guy went from having never touched Python to writing functional applications in a few weeks.

Note that the copilot doesn't help with anything non-code that you don't ask it. For example, I asked my colleague why he doesn't use venv, and it was because he'd never heard of it. He certainly isn't using version control either! On the other hand, his documentation is great because copilot helps write that as you go.

[Lyngbakr]

I'm curious how Copilot and ChatGPT affect learning. Do they help people develop a good understanding of coding by getting them moving quickly and teaching them good practices? Or do they just let folks patch together chunks of code that work as a whole although they don't really understand why? Or perhaps the reality is somewhere in between?

[McNutty]

Honestly I think it will be game changing for education (if people use it for learning). You get initial info from it then you say "simplify that further" or "expand on that". Like having a personal tutor who is a PhD in 1000 subjects,just answering all your dumb questions 24x7

[productized]

Both have CS degrees but from what I would say are "mid-tier" universities.

After they completed training, I gave them both Copilot and our internal ChatGPT (which uses the API). I did notice some speed improvement but still not to the pace & standard that I expect.