I used to think that as well. However, I’ve been thinking recently about how I might be biased.
What I realized that the above quote and what follows in the article was true before AI as well. Juniors always missed things that made code production ready.
I don’t think ai in the hands of juniors will create worse code. I think it will spawn a lot more code that was as bad as it was before.
This is still fresh thinking so I don”t have a satisfying conclusion. :)
But what about the learning rate that converts juniors into seniors over time? This will slow that process for most people, and introduce artificial cliffs and holes based on what the AI can’t fix and the junior doesn’t have enough learned skills to figure out.
OTOH, you can learn so much from the AI, so I think if you just stop and read and ask questions, I think it is a lot easier for a junior to learn than before.
> I think it will spawn a lot more code that was as bad as it was before.
And that makes it even harder for seniors to teach: it was always hard to figure out where someone has misconceptions, but now you need to work through more code. You don't even know if the misconceptions are just the AI misbehaving, the junior doing junior things, or if the junior should read up on certain design principles that may not be known to the junior yet. So, you end up with another blackbox component that you need to debug :)
I hope so. The problem is I learnt good design despite the popular "Clean Code" prevalance in the world, by actual experience. But if AI is doing most of the coding and if that code mostly works, would there be an incentive for the junior devs to try out different ideas?
What I realized that the above quote and what follows in the article was true before AI as well. Juniors always missed things that made code production ready.
I don’t think ai in the hands of juniors will create worse code. I think it will spawn a lot more code that was as bad as it was before.
This is still fresh thinking so I don”t have a satisfying conclusion. :)