AI Was Supposed to Help Juniors Shine. Why Does It Mostly Make Seniors Stronger?

If you search back HN history to the beginnings of AI coding in 2021 you will find people observing that AI is bad for juniors because they can't distinguish between good and bad completions. There is no surprise, it's always been this way.

I read, ages ago, this apocryphal quote by William Gibson: “The most important skill of the 21st century is to figure out which proper keywords to type in the Google search bar, to display the proper answers.”

To me, that has never been more true.

Most junior dev ask GeminiPiTi to write the JavaScript code for them, whereas I ask it for explanation on the underlying model of async/await and the execution model of a JavaScript engine.

There is a similar issue when you learn piano. Your immediate wish is to play Chopin, whereas the true path is to identify,name and study all the tricks there are in his pieces of art.

AI is filling "narrow" gaps. In the case of seniors these are:

-techs they understand but still not master. AI aids with implementation details only experts knowb about

- No time for long coding tasks. It aids with fast implementations and automatic tests.

- No time for learning techs that adress well understood problems. Ai helps with quick intros, fast demos and solver of learners' misunderstandings

In essence, in seniors it impacts productivity

In the case of juniors AI fills the gaps too. But these are different from seniors' and AI does not excell in them because gaps are wider and broader

- Understand the problems of the business domain. AI helps but not that much.

- Understand how the organization works. AI is not very helpful here.

- Learn the techs to be used. AI helps but it doesn't know how to guide a junior in a specific organisational context and specific business domain.

In essence it helps, but not that much because the gaps are wider and more difficult to fill

> The early narrative was that companies would need fewer seniors, and juniors together with AI could produce quality code

I have never heard that before

Certainly not just coding. Senior designers and copywriters get much better results as well. It is not surprising, if context is one of the most important aspects of a prompt, then someone with domain experience is going to be able to construct better context.

Similarly, it takes experience to spot when the LLM is going in the wrong direction it making mistakes.

I think for supercharging a junior, it should be used more like a pair programmer, not for code generation. It can help you quickly gain knowledge and troubleshoot. But relying on a juniors prompts and guidance to get good code gen is going to be suboptimal.

Some of the juniors I work with frequently point to AI output as a source without any verification. One crazy example was using it to do simple arithmetic, which they then took as correct (and it was wrong).

This is all a pretty well-trodden debate at this point though. AI works as a Copilot which you monitor and verify and task with specific things, it does not work as a pilot. It's not about junior or senior, it's about whether you want to use this thing to do your homework/write your essay/write your code for you or whether you use it as an assistant/tutor, and whether you are able to verify its output or not.

For the same reason that an amateur with a powertool ends up in the emergency room and a seasoned pro knows which way to point the business end. AI is in many ways a powertool, if you don't know what you are doing it will help you to do that much more efficiently. If you do know what you are doing it will do the same.

learning typically follows a specific path.

1. Unconsciously incompetent

2. Consciously incompetent

3. Consciously competent

4. Unconsciously competent

The challenge with AI, it will give you “good enough” output, without feedback loops you never move to 2,3,4 and assume you are doing ok. Hence it stunts learning. So juniors or inexperienced stay inexperienced, without knowing what they don’t know.

You have to Use it as an expert thinking partner. Tell it to ask you questions & not give you the answer.

does it really? it lets seniors work more, but idk if its necessarily stronger.

i just soent some time cleaning up au code where it lied about the architecture so it wrote the wrong thing. the architecture is wonky, sure, but finding the wonks earlier would have been better

Step one would be to stop calling whatever this is “AI” because while it may be artificial, it is not at all intelligent.

Because it's too unpredictable so far. AI saves me time, but only because I could do everything it attempts to do myself.

It's wrong maybe 40-50% of the time, so I can't even imagine the disasters I'm averting by recognising when it's giving me completely bonkers suggestions.

Ai amplifies intelligence/skill