Lol I would be your Jr, except instead of 10 seconds of silence it would be 10 seconds of me frantically clacking on the keyboard “add a block to this for these packages with proper syntax, I forgot to include it” to claude. Then I’d of course be all discombobulated and shit so I wouldn’t even bother to open code, I’d just ctrl-c about 100 lines somewhere around the general area of where I think the new code block should go, then ctrl-v the whole thing into the chat box because why not the company is paying out the dick for these tokens so might as well use them.
And two weeks later half our website crashes which results in you having to go to a meeting where management tells you to keep a closer eye on me. Which is basically what you had been already doing before AI but now you get to babysit me and claude!
Aceticon@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 weeks ago
Just to add to this:
So beyond the first order effects you pointed out - the using of more time from more experience and hence expensive people - there is a second order effect due of loss of improvement in the making of code which is both persistent and cumulative with time: every review and feedback of the code from a junior dev reduces forever the future need for that, whilst every review and feedback of the code from an AI has no impact at all in need for it in the future.
BrianTheeBiscuiteer@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Seniors reviewing code is fine but only when, as someone else mentioned, the code writer is learning from the review. The AI doesn’t learn at all and the Jr Dev probably learns very little because they didn’t understand the original code. Reviewing AI code often turns into me rewriting most of it.
Aceticon@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 weeks ago
Exactly.
The best way to learn is to have done the work yourself with all the mistakes that come from not knowing certain things, having wrong expectations or forgetting to account for certain situations, and then get feedback on your mistakes, especially if those giving the feedback know enough to understand the reasons behind the mistakes of the other person.
Another good way to learn is by looking through good quality work from somebody else, though it’s much less effective.
I suspect that getting feedback on work of “somebody” else (the AI) which isn’t even especially good yields, very little learning.
So linking back to my previous post, even though the AI process wastes a lot of time from a more senior person, not only will the AI (which did most of the implementation) not learn at all, but the junior dev that’s supposed to oversee and correct the AI will learn very little thus will improve very little. Meanwhile with the process that did not involve an AI, the same senior dev time expenditure will have taught the junior dev a lot more and since that’s the person doing most of the work yielded a lot more improvement next time around, reducing future expenditure of senior dev time.