New Junior Developers Can’t Actually Code
nmn.gl
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.
  • P03 LockeEnglish
    11•4 days ago

    This is more of a personality problem than an issue with AI itself. StackOverflow has been doing people’s homework for decades now.

    If the talent is crap, then you tighten the hiring process. Never hire a developer without a series of code tests.

    • @[email protected]English
      3•4 days ago

      Yeah, I feel like I read the exact same article about stackoverflow 10 years ago. Junior devs will paste code from anywhere in their project until they properly learn the language/framework/platform.

  • @[email protected]English
    2•4 days ago

    I’m genuinely impressed people can get the damn things to generate working code. I periodically ask them to do something and every single time they will hallucinate.

    • @[email protected]English
      3•4 days ago

      LLMs can’t do software engineering. They can do some basic coding tasks if given very precise instructions by someone that did the actual engineering work.

      It’s like having a mediocre junior developer that just happens to know the syntax and standard library of every major programming language as a service.