[CuriouslyC]

I've gotten Claude Code to make CUDA kernels and all kinds of advanced stuff that there's zero percent chance a junior would pull off.

AI is like a super advanced senior wearing a blindfold. It knows almost everything, it's super fast, and it gets confused pretty quickly about things after you tell it.

[skeeter2020]

it's not a senior though, because of the amount of oversight and guidance required. I trust senior-plus human developers to do the right thing and understand why it's the right thing. For mission critical things I get another human senior to verify. There's no way I'd autonomously trust 2, 10 or any number of LLMs to do the same thing.

[achierius]

You'd be surprised at what juniors can pull off. I have seen fresh-out-of-college new grads write performant GPU kernels that are used in real world library implementations for particular architectures.

[versteegen]

Of course they can. It doesn't take that long to learn CUDA/etc and hardware details, read through some manuals and performance guides, do some small projects to solidify that knowledge. What you need is talent, and some months. That's why at university I saw plenty of students pull off amazing projects, and there's nothing eyebrow-raising in the slightest about starting a PhD a year after getting a bachelor's and writing software more sophisticated than most programmers would write in their career.

I think the programming profession overvalues experience over skill. However, when I was young I had no appreciation for what the benefits of experience are... including not writing terrible code.

[CuriouslyC]

Most of the juniors I've worked with would make numerical errors and give up/declare premature victory before getting the implementation to a robust state. I'm sure there are exceptional young folks out there though.

[godelski]

  > Most of the juniors

Most senior programmers can't write CUDA kernels either. Even fewer can write ones that are any good.

[computerex]

What's your sample size?

[andoando]

And today I asked Claude code to carefully look at and follow the structure of my tests and write some more, and after 5-10 mins it completely ignored it, wrote one class with all the helper methods and a bunch of compilation errors from fields that arent even in my model.

I figured there's probably a ton more logical issues and deleted it immediately

[QuadmasterXLII]

have you ever asked a junior developer to write a cuda kernel?

[CuriouslyC]

I've asked juniors to write easier things without success, and I applied the transitive property.