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Comment by jjmarr | Hacker News Reader

As a junior developer it's much easier for me to jump into a new codebase or language and make an impact. I just shipped a new error message in LLVM because Cline found the 5 spots in 10k+ files where I needed to make the code changes.

When I started an internship last year, it took me weeks to learn my way around my team's relatively smaller codebase.

I consider this a skill and cost issue.

If you are rich and able to read fast, you can start writing LLVM/Chrome/etc features before graduating university.

If you cannot afford the hundreds of dollars a month Claude costs or cannot effectively review the code as it is being generated, you will not be employable in the workforce.

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But if you had instead spent the "weeks to learn your way around the codebase", that would have given dividends forever. I'm a bit afraid that by oneshoting features like these, many will never get to the required level to do bigger changes that relies on a bigger understanding.

Of course, LLMs might get there eventually. But until then I think it will create a bigger divide between seniors and juniors than it traditionally has been.

I've never been able to one-shot a feature with an agent. It's much easier to "learn my way around the codebase" by watching the AI search the codebase and seeing its motivation/mental model.

Going AFK is a terrible idea anyways because I have to intervene when it's making bad architectural decisions. Otherwise it starts randomly deleting stuff or changing the expected results of test cases so they'll pass.

> If you cannot afford the hundreds of dollars a month Claude costs

Employers will buy AI tools for their employees, this isn't a problem.

If you're saying that you need to buy and learn these tools yourself in order to get a job, I strongly disagree. Prompting is not exactly rocket science, and with every generation of models it gets easier. Soon you'll be able to pick it up in a few hours. It's not a differentiator.

I need side projects and OSS contributions to get hired as a new graduate or an intern. The bar for both of those will be much higher if everyone is using AI.

Yes side project are for fun and for learning, not for prompting an LLM. Unless you dislike coding and problem solving.

> make an impact.

To me, a junior devs biggest job is learning and not delivering value. Is a pitfall I'm seeing in my own team where he is so focused on delivering value that he's not gaining an understanding.

You're sabotaging yourself though. You are avoiding learning.

What's the point of shipping a Chrome feature before graduating? Just to put in your CV that you've committed in some repo? In the past this would be signal of competence, but now you're working towards a future where doing this thing is not competence signaling anymore.

Some companies do not like you upload their code to 3rd parties

I'm curious what tooling you are using to accomplish this?

I used Cline+Claude 3.7 Sonnet for the initial draft of this LLVM PR. There's a lot of handholding and the final version was much different than the original.

https://github.com/llvm/llvm-project/pull/130458

Right now I'm using Roo Code and Claude 4.0. Roo Code looks cooler and draws diagrams but I don't know if it's better.

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