Comment by mikeocool | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mikeocool | Hacker News Reader

Pre-AI juniors were valuable because on many tasks, it was faster for me (senior eng) to write a quick spec have a conversation with a junior, and have them go off for a few hours or a few days and write the code, and then come back with it for review. I could do that with several junior engineers and pretty reasonably paralellize the work.

Now a junior takes my spec, drops it into Claude, and submits a PR a few minutes later. So I'm back to being the bottleneck -- there's constant pressure to provide specs and review code, and ultimately that process is just me having an indirect conversation with Claude (em dash is mine).

The junior is probably providing negative value, since it would be more efficient for me just to talk to Claude, and they're not learning anything, because it's really hard to learn anything by skimming code that's being pooped out by Claude.

I'm not sure what the solution to this is, I still think we need to train junior engineers. I think my best advice to juniors right now is stop using Claude so much. Use it to plan and answer questions, but you should still be writing code even it's slower. Because that's the only way they're going to learn enough to effectively guide AI and review output and get past being a net negative.

Do you think that its possible to raise the bar for junior engineers such that "you have AI now, so I need you to own farther up the review chain yourself"? I feel like I could answer either way. No, you need reps on projects to have that kind of judgement, that's what makes a senior. But also yes, while it will take the junior way longer to do that kind of review, they have the time to do it now, and its now the bottleneck so it makes sense to put their effort into that portion.

We have the same issue and now spending more time/energy on optimizing the code review agent.

This might lead to more automatisation and not less if it works. After all we might extract everything critical to us.

We also now expect juniors to review the other ones code first.

> because it's really hard to learn anything by skimming code that's being pooped out by Claude.

I think this is pretty dubious. It's true that you have to do more proactive learning with an agentic workflow, but it doesn't mean you can't learn stuff. Software engineers forged in the age of AI are not learning the same things their predecessors did or thinking about code in the same way, but the more curious people will still be better at the job, which is I think how it's always been. It seems a little unclear how much "AI brain rot" will be a force unto itself that neuters even the smartest of the juniors, but I think it's still an open question.

I think AI is a great learning tool - I have learned a ton from it.

But when I just ask to do a thing and then read the code (typical in a professional environment when there’s pressure to get shit delivered), i have not found that be an effective learning method.

When I’m learning from it I typically go out of my way to have it explain how to do things and things are the way they are. And I often leave the actual typing the code to myself, since that tends to force an active understanding that’s not required when you’re just reading.

If folks have other ideas on how to get that active understanding, I’d love to hear them. Because telling people they should type code seems like it’s going the way of telling people to write cursive.

This, pretty much exactly what I've been noticing too. Feel for the juniors though, its rough trying to learn when the tool in front of you can just spit the whole answer out. I still think they're worth it, but tbh I just don't have a good answer yet for how to actually use them well, maybe just takes time to figure that out.

Wherever I worked (and as long as it was up to me), the mindset and expectation was that a junior we hire will need to become a medior in max 2 years. Of course, we provided the right investment (environment, mentorship, coaching, learning budget). This also acted as a filter at hiring. This way the question was never "for today's tasks do we need a senior OR a junior".

About AI: Unless there's another breakthrough, AI is not getting significantly better. A junior with 2 years of proper training easily surpasses AI in judgment and arch design skills, etc. - and you will need seasoned engineers to make the calls and shepherd AI even. Where will those people come from if nobody is investing in juniors?

The other challenge with real people is the emotional aspect. Easier and faster to tell ai the code it wrote is terrible and needs to be redone completely, or maybe you just end the session and use a new model. Trickier to do with a human.

SAT for junior developers; questions are code snippets and architectural decisions.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com