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Comment by steezeburger | Hacker News Reader

Experience is so so valuable right now. We can guide these agents super well, but I do fear for the juniors as you said. I would like to think I'd use the agents to dive deeper and learn faster. It was pretty rough piecing together solutions from Stack Overflow, various irc channels, Reddit, etc. But also, I cheated on my homework in college and didn't really review the answers, so not sure. Though I pursued programming out of interest and not just to complete a degree. Maybe it would have been different. In any case, I'm glad I came into the LLM era with a lot of experience and failures already.

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I don't think "cheating" is the right way to frame it.

A junior has managers pushing them to do more, faster. You review the code but do you really understand it the same as if you struggled through it? Do you ever build the muscle memory of what works and what doesn't?

It is the thought process that builds skills. I've seen some projects trying to be deliberate about learning from the agent as it writes to code - but I'm not sure there is a substitute for struggling and learning by doing.

I think this is one of the key takes right now. I too have similar experience.

Which way is it going to go?

i) “Seniors” also get superseded by even more capable models that can do all of the things which currently require experience.

ii) Linguistics become the new higher order abstraction (English is the new high-level programming language) _but_ there are different / orthogonal ways of approaching software development than the way we do things now — which “juniors” become more adept at more quickly.

There's also iii) people realize that if the LLM needs that much babysitting, it doesn't actually add value. So they don't use it very much because it is too limited as a tool.

> Experience is so so valuable right now.

I think traditional coding experience will be a lot more valuable in 5-10 years, given the apparent inverse relationship between that and LLM usage, and the number of people who seem to already be heavily reliant on LLMs today.

The next killer app on the scale of today's LLMs could be an LLM (or call it whatever) that can un-spaghettify the reams of code that are currently being generated by LLMs.

When the chainsaw fails the juniors, they're going to be adding wood chippers and stump grinders. The seniors are going to be out there chipping artisanal wood blocks with a hatchet. You don't need a lot of history to see who you really need to be worried about.

Its not the internet that needs convincing, its the ones writing the checks

> Experience is so so valuable right now.

And probably the least valued it has ever been.

Metrics, profilers, architecture! Use AI to get back to basics! Wanna prove a technique is better? Use AI to make a benchmark! Learn by experimentation! That is my advice to juniors. At the end of the day AI is writing code and there may be 10 different ways to run something. Only one is the fastest in any given use case.

Fastest is usually the wrong metric. But you'd need experience to know that, I suppose...

But the point is that LLMs giving you 10x the potential code output doesn't have to mean 10x the code committed. It can also be "let's look at all three possible implementations in more detail and decide which is really the best fit for our situation, and commit that one."

That's still 2-3x the velocity, but you get a better result because you went deeper on the paths-not-taken when designing.

I think it's just the wrong metric to optimize for _first_. It's not generally a bad metric to keep tabs on though. Make it work, make it right, make it fast? Or something like that.

Yeah I totally agree! I also think people should still be reading as much code as they can. That's always been true imo. It is just hard to keep up with it now because of how much code an LLM can generate for $20/month. I do think we'll move to higher abstractions of course. We won't have to understand code as much as how the systems and components are architected. It would also be nice to use our new efficiency to return to producing truly optimized and fast software.

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