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Comment by zamfi | Hacker News Reader

I've been wondering about this. They'll still get that hard-won engineering wisdom that comes from watching AI agents code badly, deploy it, and have it fail---as much as we'd like it to be otherwise, engineering wisdom often comes from experience, not just from hearing stories from senior devs.

I guess the question is whether this role is still employable.

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But isnt this a very ineffective way of learning from second-hand mistakes?

It's not really second hand. The LLM didn't merge and deploy the code. The developer did. The LLM won't fix the bad push, the developer will have to. This is no different than a more junior dev copying and pasting a snippet from Stack Overflow that they partially understand without accounting for the edge cases or sometimes even their specific use case. Experience comes from failure and LLMs will help you fail and potentially help you recover from it just like any other resource developers have been using for years.

The novelty is that AI made the „pasting code“ work somehow whereas copy and paste from stack overflow did not.

Before merge and deploy you need to run the code. If it fails what do you do? search a new snippet on stack overflow? or paste the error into the ai?

This seems like a completely inefficient way of learning to me.

I’ve found it effective in the past as a manager to assign the implementation of a feature, end to end to a junior developer, and basically rubber stamp their PRs.

Our company has a culture of expecting the person who wrote the code to support it, and so if it’s poorly written, they inevitably have to learn to fix it, and build it back in a way that can prevent issues in the future.

Obviously care has to be taken to assign the right projects with the right level of guidance and guard rails but when done well, people learn quickly.

I think the same spirit can be applied to AI generated code

Interesting point.

Of course, the question remains of whether companies that buy into AI will hire a sufficient stream of junior developers so that some of them will graduate into seniors.

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