AI Was Supposed to Help Juniors Shine. Why Does It Mostly Make Seniors Stronger?

Re:AI Was Supposed to Help Juniors Shine. Why Does It Mostly... by fsloth on Sunday September 21, 2025 @09:26AM (#45322520)

This. You _have_ to write the spec. The result is that instead of spending X units of time on spec and THEN y units of time on coding, you get the whole thing in x units of time AND you have a spec.

The trick is knowning where the particular LLM sucks. I expect in a short amount of time there is no productivity gain but when you start to understand the limitations and strengths - holey moley.

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Re:AI Was Supposed to Help Juniors Shine. Why Does It Mostly... by skydhash on Sunday September 21, 2025 @10:21AM (#45322989)

> The result is that instead of spending X units of time on spec and THEN y units of time on coding, you get the whole thing in x units of time AND you have a spec.

It's more like x units of time thinking and y units of times coding, whereas I see people spend x/2 thinking, x typing the specs, y correcting the specs, and y giving up and correcting the code.

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Re:AI Was Supposed to Help Juniors Shine. Why Does It Mostly... by fsloth on Sunday September 21, 2025 @11:20AM (#45323540)

Sure! That's inefficient. I know just how I work and I've been writing the type of programs I do for quite many years. And I know what would take me normally a week takes me few days at best.

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Re:AI Was Supposed to Help Juniors Shine. Why Does It Mostly... by nicce on Sunday September 21, 2025 @04:08PM (#45326190)

But if you can’t define the specs, you can’t write the code without LLM either?

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Re:AI Was Supposed to Help Juniors Shine. Why Does It Mostly... by smsm42 on Sunday September 21, 2025 @11:33AM (#45323659)

Unless you realize no LLM is good at what you need and you just wasted weeks of time walking in circles.

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Re:AI Was Supposed to Help Juniors Shine. Why Does It Mostly... by fsloth on Monday September 22, 2025 @08:40AM (#45332593)

If you notice only after two weeks the project is off-kilter I would guess the chance of that happening without an LLM is not low either.

These are not _tools_ -they are like cool demos. Once you have a certain mass of functional code in place, intuition - that for myself required decades of programming to develop - kicks in and you get these spider sense tinglings ”ahh umm this does not feel right, something’s wrong”.

My advice would be don’t use LLM until you have the ”spider-sense” level intuition.

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