| One thing I have noticed with some newer coworkers / fresh grads is that they seem much more willing to copy someone's issue from slack into gpt and regurgitate out a "here's what gpt says", which muddies the water a bit or is at least a bit unhelpful. Which is fine - developing the feeling of what to say and when takes time and experience. And sometimes it can help, after all - or spark a useful learning opportunity about why a particular llm recommendation looks useful but isn't. Though it takes a bit of energy to walk the line of teaching and encouraging growth without dampening enthusiasm, and spending that energy is its own opportunity cost. But it does feel a bit different than before - I don't recall seeing as much less-helpful "here's what a stack overflow post said" messages in threads years ago. It did and does happen, but I think it is much more common with LLMs. Thankfully, that is just a case of someone actively trying to not be lazy; trying to help, using the resources at hand. Decades ago that would have meant looking in some old docs or textbooks or specs, years ago that would have been googling, and now it's something else. I think the accessibility and availability of answers from LLMs for such "quick research" situations is the culprit, rather than any particular decline in developer behaviors themselves. At least, in this case. I'm sure I would have seen the same rate of "trying to help but getting in the way" posting years ago had stack overflow or google had a way of conjuring answers to questions that simply didn't exist in its corpus. I think the "in the old days" sentiment from the author somewhat divides things into a before/after AI situation, but IMO it has been a gradual gradient as new tooling and information sources have become available. AI is another one of those, and a big jump, but it doesn't feel like a novel change in "laziness" yet. Though, there's been some big pushes towards relying more and more on various AI code reviewers and fuzzers in my area. I feel like that is an area where the author's concerns will come more and more into play - laziness at the boundary layers, at the places of oversight; essentially, laziness by senior devs and leadership. |