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Comment by aqme28 | Hacker News Reader

Working with AI just feels like having a team of junior employees.

Is this the same effect that causes managers and people in power to sometimes become... (for lack of a better phrase) stupid and crazy?

edit: Everyone is responding to the "junior" part of my comment without addressing the actual question I'm asking. I should have just said "employees" -- Sorry.

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It doesn't. Juniors are generally SLOW because they are soaking up information and constantly learning. However, this allowed them to learn how to work through difficult problems, and how to communicate if they can't achieve their goals.

I think LLMs are a big problem for development of junior devs.(pun intended)

I train up beginners pretty regularly and this is not a good analogy.

I honestly detest the junior employee analogy, AI is not and will never be like working with actual humans.

Agreed, and I feel like it was pretty rare to distinguish junior devs before LLMs, we just used to talk about devs and senior devs. Then we needed a way to make sure it's understood that WE understand how dumb an LLM can be, so "junior" smashed its way into the discourse.

If anything, it's more like an over enthusiastic intern who'll go way down a rabbithole of self-doubt and overengineering when you're away at a conference for 3 days.

I guess-- it feels like a junior dev in the sense that it has terrible self-direction, but is fully capable at the actual act of coding.

How about "Working with AI just feels like having a team of junior employees who are completely unscrupulous, sychophantic and sometimes profoundly stupid psychopathic liars"?

A team of fresh slaves.

That you can be utterly awful to and they won't quit or feel sick. They'll never show up to work hung over or have a relative that needs surgery so they need an advance in pay and also they're never emotional because their partner of seven years broke up with them and their dog and cat and pet rabbit died. They'll never go to HR because you sexually harassed them, they'll work on your schedule and are available, in your house in your bed, at 4 am when inspiration hits so you pull out your laptop.

So what if they lie every once in a while?

right. working with junior devs should include teaching which reinforces thinking and problem solving fundamentals

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