[throwway120385]

I've never had a junior dev be a "net negative." Maybe you're just not supervising or mentoring them at all? The first thing I tell all new hires under me is that their job is to solve more problems than they create, and so far it's worked out.

[antonymoose]

I’ve had interns be a net negative, I’ve had Juniors be a net negative, I’ve had Seniors be a net negative and even managers!

Turns out some people suck, but most of them don’t suck.

[JustExAWS]

But by definition, junior developers with no experience are going to need more handholding and tale time away from experience developers.

[Capricorn2481]

> junior developers with no experience are going to need more handholding

Unlike AI, which gives me fake methods, broken code, and wrong advice with full confidence.

[JustExAWS]

I just “wrote” 2000 lines of code for a project between Node for the AWS CDK and Python using the AWS SDK (Boto3). Between both, ChatGPT needed to “know” the correct API for 12 services, SQL and HTML (for a static report). The only thing it got wrong with a one shot approach was a specific Bedrock message payload for a specific LLM model. That was even just a matter of saying “verify the payload on the web using the official docs”.

Yes it was just as well structured as I - someone who has been coding as a hobby or professionally for four decades - would have done.

[Capricorn2481]

That's great for you. I ask Sonnet 4 to make a migration and a form in Laravel Filament, and it regularly shits itself. I'm curious what those 12 services were, they must've had unchanging, well documented APIs.

[JustExAWS]

That’s the advantage of working with AWS services, everything is well documented with plenty of official and unofficial code showing how to do most things.

Even for a service I know is new, I can just tell it to “look up the official documentation”

Using ChatGPT 5 Fast

AWS CDK apps (separate ones) using Node

- EC2 (create an instance)

- Aurora MySQL Serverless v2

- Create a VPC with no internet access - the EC2 instance was used as a jump box using Session Manager

- VPC Endpoints for Aurora control plane, SNS, S3, DDB, Bedrock, SQS, Session Manager

- Lambda including using the Docker lambda builder

- DDB

- it also created the proper narrowly scoped IAM permissions for tfe lambdas (I told it the services the Lambdas cared about)

The various Lambdas in Python using Boto3

- Bedrock including the Converse and Invoke APIs for the Nova and Anthropic families

- knowing how to process SQS Messages coming in as events

- MySQL flavored SQL for Upserts

- DDB reads

In another project the services were similar with the addition of Amazon Transcribe.

[skydhash]

> I just “wrote” 2000 lines of code for a project between Node...

I think I wrote -200 lines of code on my last PR. I may be doing something bad for that number to be negative.

[JustExAWS]

The difference is probably that I only do green field POC implementations as a solely developer/cloud architect on a project if I am doing hands on keyboard work.

The other part of my job is leading larger projects where I purposefully don’t commit to pulling stories off the board since I’m always in meetings with customers, project managers, sales or helping other engineers.

I might even then do a separate POC as a research project/enablement. But it won’t be modifying existing code that I didn’t design.

[antonymoose]

Truly depends on the organization and systems. I’m at a small firm with too few Senior staff, lots of fire-fighting going on among us, etc. We have loads of low-hanging fruit for our Juniors so we tend to have very quick results after an initial onboarding.