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Comment by infecto | Hacker News Reader

You’re right that it’s possible to read the original comment as just laying out two boundary conditions—but I think we have to acknowledge how narrative framing shapes the takeaway. The way it’s written leads the reader toward a conclusion: “LLMs are great for junior, fast-shipping devs; less so for experienced, meticulous engineers.” Even if that wasn’t the intent, that’s the message most will walk away with.

But they drew boundaries with very specific conditions that lead the reader. It’s a common theme in these AI discussions.

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> LLMs are great for junior, fast-shipping devs; less so for experienced, meticulous engineers

Is that not true? That feels sufficiently nuanced and gives a spectrum of utility, not binary one and zero but "10x" on one side and perhaps 1.1x at the other extrema.

The reality is slightly different - "10x" is SLoC, not necessarily good code - but the direction and scale are about right.

That feels like the opposite of being true. Juniors have, by definition, little experience - the LLM is effectively smarter than them and much better at programming, so they're going to be learning programming skills from LLMs, all while futzing about not sure what they're trying to express.

People with many years or even decades of hands-on programming experience, have the deep understanding and tacit knowledge that allows them to tell LLMs clearly what they want, quickly evaluate generated code, guide the LLM out of any rut or rabbit hole it dug itself into, and generally are able to wield LLMs as DWIM tools - because again, unlike juniors, they actually know what they mean.

I don't think junior vs senior is actually that well defined. There are met "senior" 30 year old programmers and "junior" 30 year olds (who have also been programming for ~2 decades).

no, those are two examples of many many possible circumstances. I intentionally made it two very specific examples so that was clear. Seems it wasn't so clear.

Fair enough but if you have to show up in the comments clarifying that your clearly delineated “IF this THEN that” post wasn’t meant to be read as a hard divide, maybe the examples weren’t doing the work you thought they were. You can’t sketch a two-point graph and then be surprised people assume it’s linear.

Again I think the high level premise is correct as I already said, the delivery falls flat though. Your more junior devs have larger opportunity of extracting value.

I and others understood it perfectly well. Maybe the problem wasn’t with the post.

And I along with others who upvoted me did not. What’s your point? Seems like you have none and instead just want to point fingers.

The guy was nice enough to explain his post that you got confused about. Rather than be thankful you used that as evidence that he was not clear and lectured him on it.

I gently suggested that the problem may have not been with his post but with your understanding. Apparently you missed the point again.

If multiple people misread the post, clarity might be the issue, not comprehension. Dismissing that as misunderstanding doesn’t add much. Let’s keep it constructive.

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