[tuvang]

There is a deadly game of chicken going on. Junior recruiting already stopped for the most part. Only way this doesn’t end in a catastrophe is if AI becomes genuinely as good as the most skilled developers before we run out of them. Which I doubt very much but don’t find completely impossible.

[theshrike79]

And the irony is that AI usage should make onboarding juniors easier.

Before it was "hey $senior_programmer where's the $thing defined in this project?", which either required a dedicated person onboarding or someone's flow was interrupted - an expected cost of bringing up juniors.

Now a properly configured AI Agent can answer that question in 60 seconds, unblocking the Junior to work on something.

And no, it doesn't mean Juniors or anyone else get to make 10k line PRs of code they haven't read nor understand. That's a very different issue that can be solved by slapping people over the head.

[bragr]

The problem is that juniors given access to AI don't seem to learn as much. AI just gives them fish over and over instead of learning how to fish.

[andrekandre]

  > The problem is that juniors given access to AI don't seem to learn as much.

i see this first-hand; they don't even know what they don't know so they circle over and over with ai leading them down rabbit holes and code that breaks in weird ways they cant even guess how to fix... stuff that if you were a real programmer you would have wrote in a few minutes let alone hours or days...

[theshrike79]

Yea, giving people a blank Claude with no setup will get you that.

What you could do is encourage (or force with IT's assistance) them to use a prompt (or hook or whatever) that refuses to do work for them, but instead telling them where to change and what without actually doing the work.

[flir]

Or if code quality stops mattering, in a kind of "ok, the old codebase is irretrievably sphagettified. Lets just have the chatbot extract all the requirements from it, and build a clean room version" kind of way. It's also not impossible we go that route.