But they don't learn from that, they turn the crank of the AI tooling and once they have something that works it goes in and they move on. I've seen this directly, you can't shortcut actual understanding.
I disagree. LLM assisted coding is yet another level of abstraction. It’s the same thing as an assembly programmer saying that OOP programmers don’t learn from OOP coding.
Today’s juniors still learn the same core skill, the abstract thinking and formalization of a problem is still there. It’s just done on a higher level of abstraction and in an explicitly formulated natural language instead of a formal one for the first time ever. They’re not even leaving out the formal one completely, because they need to integrate and fine tune the code for it to work as needed.
Does it introduce new problems? Sure. Does it mean that today’s juniors will be less capable compared to today’s seniors once they have the same amount of experience? I really doubt it.
>It’s the same thing as an assembly programmer saying that OOP programmers don’t learn from OOP coding.
Not the same. Whether you are writing Assembly or Java, you have to determine and express your intent with high accuracy - that is a learned skill. Providing problem details to an LLM until it produces something that looks correct is not the same type of skill.
If that is the skill that the business world demands in 5 years, so be it, but arguing that it's simply the next step in the Assembly, C, Java progression makes no sense.
> Providing problem details to an LLM until it produces something that looks correct
If you're using LLMs to code like this, you're using them incorrectly. You need to specify your intent precisely from the start which is a skill you learn. You can use other tools like OOP languages incorrectly with "working" results as well, that's why code quality, clean code and best practices are a thing.
I'm sure many junior developers use LLMs the way you described but maybe that's exactly what the universities and seniors need to teach them?
You might, just as ages ago when people were complaining about juniors c+ping stack overflow answers you might have said you used them to learn from.
LLMs are a turbo charged version of the same problem, only now rather than copying a code fragment from stack overflow you can have an LLM spit out a working solution. There is no need to understand what you're doing to be productive, and if you don't understand it you have no model or reasoning to apply in the future to other problems, maybe AI will save you there too for a while, but eventually it won't and you'll find you've built your career on sand.
Or maybe I'm wrong and we're all headed for a future of being prompt engineers.
Generally the understanding happens fairly quickly just by glancing through the code.
I was a sceptic up until recently, where I failed to create a solution myself.
Since I am mostly a hobbyist programmer(for 25 years and counting) I often find I don’t have the time to sit down for prolonged periods to reason about my code.
ChatGPT helps my tired brain from work develop my code 10x quicker, easily, by removing road blocks for me.
Today’s juniors still learn the same core skill, the abstract thinking and formalization of a problem is still there. It’s just done on a higher level of abstraction and in an explicitly formulated natural language instead of a formal one for the first time ever. They’re not even leaving out the formal one completely, because they need to integrate and fine tune the code for it to work as needed.
Does it introduce new problems? Sure. Does it mean that today’s juniors will be less capable compared to today’s seniors once they have the same amount of experience? I really doubt it.