[vitaflo]

It’s difficult to do the hard work of you haven’t done the easy work 10,000 times. And we tend to get paid for the hard work.

LLMs remove the easy work from the junior devs task pile. That will make it a lot more difficult for them to do the actual hard work required of a dev. They skipped the stepping stones and critical thinking phase of their careers.

Senior devs are senior because they’ve done the easy things so often it’s second nature.

[mattgreenrocks]

Fantastic insight. Without doing the easy work, we cannot recognize when it is appropriate, which is more often than not, in my experience. There's also a certain humility to doing things as simply as possible. LLMs lack the self-reflective capability to see that maybe an incremental change to use batching for a write-heavy op shouldn't be 200 lines of code.

Tools can't replace human understanding of a problem, and that understanding is the foundation for effective growth and maintenance of code.

[mandevil]

This is what my wife (a hospital pharmacist) thinks too. She has developed her medical intuition on thousands of patients, through education, rotations, residency, years of working, etc. And most patients are straightforward and easy. But it is those easy cases that build the judgement skills necessary to make her so fast and effective when she gets to the hard cases.

Maybe an AI would be better on the easy cases- slightly faster and cheaper. But it would mean that she would never develop the skills to tackle the problems that AI has no idea how to handle.