[sotix]

AI has made senior engineers useless to me. I have purposefully asked senior engineers specific questions to get their insight on a matter only to have them tell me, "here's what our internal AI tool said". This has occurred countless times. I find that staff and principal engineers have remained extraordinarily valuable as teachers. Our junior devs have been exceptional and are eager to learn. Our seniors have become lazier and stopped being as generous with their knowledge.

[fdgg]

Its a disaster.

Remember this simple fact - if you dont use it, you lose it. The cognitive damage these tools will create wont be largely visible on a macro-scale for a few more years yet. But people are eventually going to realise, all this work (pre off-loading to LLMs) once geared the brain to work in a particular kind of way that results in the generation of ideas for inventions to yield innovations and so on...

Personally Im only strictly hiring people who have not been exposed to the LLM-virus / people who are extremely disciplined with their use about it (which is difficult to determine).

[move-on-by]

I’ve seen this too, but mostly with the ‘team lead’ seniors- the ones interested in the management track.

On the other hand, a SE2 was asking me for help with something that was way off track from what they should have been doing. This isn’t a new SE2, but someone who seems the have topped out as an SE2. Anyways, they were not understanding anything I was pointing them towards, so I got frustrated and just gave them the exact prompt to feed into their AI. The AI fixed it for them. They were amazed by the result, but should have been horrified by their uselessness instead.