Something’s been bugging me about how new devs and I need to talk about it. We’re at this weird inflection point in software development. Every junior dev I talk to has Copilot or Claude or GPT running 24/7. They’re shipping code faster than ever. But when I dig deeper into their understanding of what they’re shipping? That’s where things get concerning. Sure, the code works, but ask why it works that way instead of another way? Crickets. Ask about edge cases? Blank stares. The foundational knowledge that used to come from struggling through problems is just… missing. We’re trading deep understanding for quick fixes, and while it feels great in the moment, we’re going to pay for this later.
When I had to get up to speed on a new language, it was very helpful. It’s also great to write low to medium complexity scripts in python, powershell, bash, and making ansible tasks. That said I’ve been programming for ~30 years, and could have done those things myself if I needed, but it would take some time (a lot of it being looking up documentation and writing boilerplate code).
It’s also nice for writing C# unit tests.
However, the times I’ve been stuck on my main languages, it’s been utterly useless.
ChatGPT is extremely useful if you already know what you’re doing. It’s garbage if you’re relying on it to write code for you. There are nearly always bugs and edge cases and hallucinations and version mismatches.
It’s also probably useful for looking like you kinda know what you’re doing as a junior in a new project. I’ve seen some shit in code reviews that was clearly AI slop. Usually from exactly the developers you expect.
Yeah, I’m not even that down on using LLMs to search through and organize text that it was trained on. But in it’s current iteration? It’s fancy stack overflow, but stack overflow runs on like 6 servers. I’ll be setting up some LLM stuff self hosted to play around with it, but I’m not ditching my brain’s ability to write software any time soon.
When I had to get up to speed on a new language, it was very helpful. It’s also great to write low to medium complexity scripts in python, powershell, bash, and making ansible tasks. That said I’ve been programming for ~30 years, and could have done those things myself if I needed, but it would take some time (a lot of it being looking up documentation and writing boilerplate code).
It’s also nice for writing C# unit tests.
However, the times I’ve been stuck on my main languages, it’s been utterly useless.
ChatGPT is extremely useful if you already know what you’re doing. It’s garbage if you’re relying on it to write code for you. There are nearly always bugs and edge cases and hallucinations and version mismatches.
It’s also probably useful for looking like you kinda know what you’re doing as a junior in a new project. I’ve seen some shit in code reviews that was clearly AI slop. Usually from exactly the developers you expect.
Yeah, I’m not even that down on using LLMs to search through and organize text that it was trained on. But in it’s current iteration? It’s fancy stack overflow, but stack overflow runs on like 6 servers. I’ll be setting up some LLM stuff self hosted to play around with it, but I’m not ditching my brain’s ability to write software any time soon.
I love asking AI to generate a framework / structure for a project that I then barely use and then realize I shoulda just done it myself