Ask HN: Am I getting old, or is working with AI juniors becoming a nightmare?
This is already the second time I’ve observed this. People coming from highly respected universities are doing everything with AI. It’s even hard to argue with them, since it’s all cross-checked with ChatGPT and similar tools. The picture of software development also looks completely different. Code that used to be readable in a few lines becomes 100 lines—overblown because, well, code is cheap. Now, I could argue that it makes things unreadable and so on, but honestly, who cares? Right? The AI can fix it if it breaks... So what do you guys think? Is this the future? Maybe the skill to focus on is orchestrating AI, and if you don’t do that, you become a legacy developer—someone with COBOL-like skills—still needed, but from the past millennium.
Discussion Highlights (16 comments)
kpbogdan
Yea, the development process is changing rapidly now. We are in this transitional period. I have not idea where we will end up but it will be different place vs were we were like 1 year ago.
coldtea
> So what do you guys think? Is this the future? Yes. The feature is quickly produced slop. Future LLMs will train on it too, getting even more sloppy. And "fresh out of uni juniors" and "outsourced my work to AI" seniors wont know any better.
damnitbuilds
There seems to be a disconnect, with some people claiming they don't write code any more, only specs, and me trying to get Copilot to fix a stupid sizing bug in our layout engine and it Not Getting It. Is this because the guys claiming success are working in popular, known, more limited areas like Javascript in web pages, and the people outside those, with more complex systems, don't get the same results ? I also note that most of the "Don't code any more" guys have AI tools of their own to promote...
baCist
I think all of this has a dark future. And this can be argued based on how AI works. AI systems look at code on the internet that was written by humans. This is smart, clean code. And they learn from it. What they produce — unreadable spaghetti code — is the maximum they can squeeze out of the best code written by humans. In the near future, AI-generated code will flood the internet, and AI will start training on its own code. On the other hand, juniors will forget how to write good code. And when these two factors come together in the near future, I honestly don’t know what will happen to the industry.
Daedren
It's a problem. Seniors with AI perform far better because they have the skills and experience to properly review the LLM's plans and outputs. Juniors don't have that skillset yet, but they're being pushed to use AI because their peers are using it. Where do you draw the line? What will happen when the current senior developers start retiring? What will happen when a new technology shows up that LLMs don't have human-written code to be trained on? Will pure LLM reasoning and generated agent skills be enough to bridge the gap? It's all very interesting questions about the future of the development process.
decasteve
Reviewing code becomes more arduous. Not only are the pull requests more bloated, the developer who pushed them doesn't always understand the implications of their changes. It's harder to maintain and track down bugs. I spend way too much time explaining AI generated code to the developer who "wrote" it.
kf
Yes, absolutely, if you don't use AI in coding you will be a legacy developer sooner rather than later. Everyone seriously doing it has a bunch of agents in a corporate like structure doing code reviews, the bad AI code is when someone is just using a single instance of Claude or Chat, but when you have 50 agents competing to write the best code from a single prompt, it hits differently.
sfmz
Meta/Google/Anthropic report 75%+ of coding is now AI. For every engineer orchestrating AIs -- X will be let go -- but at what ratio 3:1? 5:1? 10:1? Seems like its at least 3.
yodsanklai
> People coming from highly respected universities are doing everything with AI Nowadays, everybody is doing everything with AI, young and old alike. It's very hard to justify not doing it. That being said, you can produce good code with AI, if you know what it should look like and spend the time to prompt and iterate.
MarcelinoGMX3C
MichaelRazum, you're hitting on something crucial many of us in the trenches are seeing. The "code is cheap" mentality, as you call it, leads to bloated, unreadable code. As baCist points out, if AI starts training on its own generated code, we're headed for a real problem with quality degradation. I've found experienced developers leverage AI as a force multiplier because they can scrutinize the output, unlike juniors who often just paste and move on. The real skill is becoming an AI orchestrator, prompting effectively, and critically validating the output. Otherwise, if you're just a wrapper for AI, then yes, you become the "legacy developer" you mention because you're adding no critical thinking or value.
clintmcmahon
It's still crucial for senior level people to review and scrutinize code generated by Jr and AI developers. There's always been the need to verify the code matches the business requirement, right? It used to be when you asked someone why they wrote the code the way they did, they'd tell you they thought it was the right way because X or Y. But with AI they can respond saying they actually don't know why they wrote it a certain way. That's just what ChatGPT or Claude told them to do. So, that's the nightmare part that people are experiencing. Code reviews are important and software architecture skills are just as important now.
davidajackson
Many here will be sad but there will be a day when writing code is seen as as antiquated as using a slide rule. It is coming.
truemotive
Yes. It's even more frustrating when you land in an office full of them.
drrob
We strictly don't use agentic development, so it's not so much a problem for us. Copying and pasting from LLMs is about the height of our AI use, aside from the AI auto-complete in Visual Studio, and any new starters are made aware during the interview process that agentic dev isn't permitted, so we cut it off at the source.
moezd
Ask AI to ruthlessly reduce cognitive debt, purge unnecessarily defensive code and be extremely pragmatic about what you want to build. If an AI junior is building you Vault when you just asked for a secret rotator script, he's just showing off. Gently pull him from the clouds, since this is also within the JD of a senior engineer.
tughvn
I don't think many people expected things to change this rapidly even just a year ago. will we be able to completely keep 'spaghetti legacy code' under control? Or will the sheer drop in the 'cost of code' actually make maintenance even more of a nightmare? I'm not entirely sure, but one thing is certain that we are definitely at an inflection point right now.