There are people who don't get blocked waiting for external input in order to get tasks like this done, which I think is the intended comparison. There's a level of intuition that junior devs and LLMs don't have that senior devs do.
Sometimes looking at the same type of code and the same infra day in and day out makes you rusty. In my olden days, I did something different every week, and I had more free time to experiment.
They seem more concerned with my ability to work on the company's bread and butter.
There’s also a factor of the young being very confident that they’re right ;)
It’s just that when I review the code, I would do things differently because the agent doesn’t have experience with our codebase. Although it is getting better at in-context learning from the existing code, it is still seeing all of it for the “first time”.
It’s not a junior dev, it’s just a dev perpetually in their first week at a new job. A pretty skilled one, at that!
and a lot of things translate. How well do you onboard new engineers? Well written code is easier to read and modify, tests helps maintain correctness while showing examples, etc.
If they know what they're doing and it's not an exploratory task where the most efficient way to do it is by trial and error? Quite a few. Not always, but often.
That skill seems to have very little value in today's world though.