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Comment by socks | Hacker News Reader

unfortunately, I have a feeling that in the age of LLMs, this junior on the team will have no impetus to actually put in effort and _think_ about such a problem

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We survived the age of StackOverflow. I don't see why LLM's will be the death of critical thinking where all else has failed so far.

Totally, the future is nearly identical to the past.

Because SO at least requires you to THINK a little about what do you have a problem with.

With LLMs, you don't even need that. Just copy paste the error and you get a response. Copy and paste the Jira ticket description and you get a response. This wasn't possible with SO. Yes, none of those will likely work straight away but the point is that less thinking is required.

Hopefully, the junior's code will be reviewed before it gets merged

I can't imagine blindly committing what LLMs spit out will get you very far, much less into a job.

It's quite fashionable, people call it "vibe coding" with Cursor in "yolo mode"

I don't think LLMs are actually good enough for their code to work without any changes in all but the very simplest of cases.

Did we survive the age of StackOverflow though? The market (globally) is absolutely flooded with not-even-mediocre software devs who are effectively doing what an LLM is i.e. finding the most plausible looking answers on SO and somehow munging them together, without any real understanding of what they're doing nor why it's working (or not working). The number of people charging contract rates yet lacking an understanding of actual software design principles (largely language agnostic) and no idea how computers actually work, is scary.

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