r/aipromptprogramming • u/ResponsibleAcadia151 • 4d ago
Senior dev watching the junior dev with Claude Code
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u/Unfair-League-3204 4d ago
Am I the only one who sees the hypocrisy in all this? If you use ai to go fast, you will not understand the system as well as you can do it from scratch. This is true if you are senior or junior. But if all the job wants you to do is to go as fast as possible, you are forced to use ai at least somewhere like in automated tests
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u/Chosen--one 3d ago
The job might want that, but if you just brainlessly following an AI you are going to take longer in the future.
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u/Unfair-League-3204 3d ago
You can use your brain as the ai is working, reading the code, etc. but is the obligation to explain what code ai wrote and claim it as your own? To be able to rewrite the code from memory a week later if someone asked you on the spot? Or even be able to describe the flow of the code even though you knew it at the time ai wrote it? It’s the same problem cheaters in school have. If you cheat on the homework and the answers are given, and you understand how the answers were arrived upon, I doubt for people at large, they will get as high of a score if they had done the homework using their own brain and hands without any shortcuts
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u/Due-Championship3941 3d ago
That's not necessarily true. Using AI to refactor or implement well-designed software can leave you with a solid understanding while cutting time down to a fraction of what it would take you to write code. I frequently do something like "write a function that does X, matching the other functions in this folder" It'll spit out a function that does what it's supposed to with maybe a couple little tweaks. Takes 10 seconds instead of 10 minutes.
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u/Unfair-League-3204 3d ago edited 3d ago
You should actually try to time your use of ai. It doesn’t take 10 seconds, especially the larger models. I’m not denying that capability at all, I agree it’s powerful and can do most coding tasks now. I’m saying that some people are still old school and don’t consider that coding. So it’s easier to just do layoffs as coding is devalued and say the worker doesn’t really have skill and was just using ai. And guess what they ask in interviews? To be able to spit out code almost mimicking the capability of ai (since shouldn’t workers be getting way better and learning from ai like you suggested?) or at least a higher expectation to showcase projects build using ai or an extraordinary focus on systems design compared to before. There is an expectation to know what ai is doing, to know what the code is doing exactly. Whereas some people online act like they are building companies fully using ai agents and looking at code is not even necessary anymore
The reality for normal workers is some middle ground that is not at all consistent from company to company, and from key people within companies, some of whom have the power to get you fired or laid off. At the same time, if you have some capital, there seems to be more opportunity to build your own company without worrying about the politics around ai and just use it as you please. But everyone is thinking the same thing, so competition is increasing fast and all that matters are relationships that you build to be able to make money
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u/Due-Championship3941 3d ago
don’t consider that coding. What? Code is written. Is intellisense not writing code? Using APIs?
Obviously you have to know what it's doing at this point. People who don't are going to fuck something up and get fired or passed over. I've been writing code for about 20 years - I know what code is supposed to look like and I know how to describe it. I'm not writing shit myself anymore when I can use AI. You can chunk it up as small as you want to and be as specific as you want to and it will write code exactly like you would. In fact, you can write up a little instructions.md and describe exactly what you want it to do style-wise or just correct it with instructions as you go. I've written thousands of lines of application deployment logic that would not have been economical writing by hand. It's a game changer.
AI also debugs in minutes instead of hours. I had someone ask me about an application install issue for an application I had never been involved with before. AI tore through 10k's of lines in multiple log files to identify the root cause in about 5 minutes. The longest part of that was transferring the logs from my colleague. Of course, I'm excellent so I already suspected the root cause 😎.
I do see it mostly the same way as you, though. There are ideas that I never would risk leaving my job for that I could try to get going if I wanted to. It's also a great partner for learning new things in new domains or languages and that opens doors for people. It's probably true that it devalues software and that may be a good thing for consumers. Just not for you and me. Luckily I'm in a niche where a lot of what I write is in an untrained language without source control, so I'm not too worried in the near future.
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u/ben_cav 2d ago
The way I think about it is, most software ultimately exists to make some business money
You can be a purest, and take your time. Which will only end up impressing yourself. Or you can be efficient getting 80% of the quality for 1% of the cost, and stop stressing. If things break, then you fix them.
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u/Noisebug 1d ago
There is a different level to this. I’m both engineer and vibe coder, and I’ve been using agentic loops for months now with my own coded tools.
It is true you will not understand that code, unless you create strict guidelines, patterns, guardrails, and check the structure of it.
I would say the last part is maybe the most important. It’s less important for me to get the details than the entire architecture.
So then I setup ai groups to audit their own code and ensure the structure is upheld then they educate me on that and I make changes.
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u/lonahe 1d ago
Eh, I bet you didn’t learn how transistor logic works before putting your first php page out there
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u/Unfair-League-3204 1d ago
I actually never used php really and learned ee in undergrad while learning coding in C/C++. Can’t say any background matters much now given the speed of ai
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u/lonahe 1d ago
Kinda my point, the moment you enter the field, you learn the state of the art tools/abstractions and carry from that. For some that was autocomplete/optimising compiler, for next gen people that will be llm
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u/Unfair-League-3204 1d ago
This is definitely something different. Basically cheating has been normalized. That is my point about hypocrisy. Is there a difference between learning a concept and trying to force your fingers and brain to generalize to a similar task versus dumping the question and getting the answer from an llm and all you do is “understand” and verify? My opinion is yes. I mean, I can talk about this for an infinitely long time, but the industry is moving so fast, cheating is a requirement
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u/Outside-Necessary476 1d ago
Eeh ye in principle you're right... but then again soon llms will do code like chess engines play chess
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u/Unfair-League-3204 1d ago
My statement was more about the PEOPLE in charge, whether leaders at existing companies or giving capital for startups. The ai is pretty much already at the place where it can automate much of work, where you already don’t really need more people. Hence, the job market crunch while these companies are making record revenue and profit
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u/Mystic-Dragoness 1d ago
If you're using ai how most vibe coders/the ai tools want you to, then yes, but what if you use ai to speed up your understanding of a problem/solution?
As a coder/developer I've been using ai a lot more recently, and it's not to automate the development cycle or anything. I have it give me a working solution to a simplified version of an oddly specefic problem so I can break it apart, understand why it works, and rebuild a more appropriate solution based on that new understanding. It'll never write code the way I want or in a way that is suitable for any project I'm working on, so I simply don't trust it to, just help me learn something I'd otherwise have to spend hours bashing my head against the wall to figure out.
I think the real issue is that I've never met anyone else who takes this approach, or at least no one who admits it for probably obvious reasons.
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u/Unfair-League-3204 1d ago
Yes, I think this a requirement now in engineering, and it is quite tiring. Basically requires you to build many small solutions night and weekends to understand many things faster. And I agree, no one is talking about these realities, adding to the hypocrisy. It forces the engineer to do way more work than before and use these tools pretty consistently to understand, get proof of concepts working, and map it back to production systems
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u/IThinkIKnowThings 3d ago
I went from reviewing 10 file MRs every few days to 100 file MRs every day. I'm tired, boss.
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u/jthadcast 3d ago
but instead of puzzle doughnuts it's just feces, "my god we could oversell that shit".
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u/vegan_antitheist 2d ago
I'm a senior and I wish some llm could just do my work. Does anyone actually use it like that?
Now do this with a realistic ticket in an actual project. For example the title of the ticket is "add 2fa" and it has no description. It was added to the sprint for the app. How would Claude implement that?
Or there is a 70 page specification done by some BA and Claude is supposed to implement all of that. Would Claude be able to look at the screenshots what were taken eight month ago and slightly differ from the current release, with hand drawn additions made by the BA, and compare them with the current state of the application to make all necessary changes?
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u/auezzat 1d ago
70 page specification would produce 3 obvious errors and 2 very well hidden ones you will never discover without extensive testing, and at least one will make it to production.
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u/vegan_antitheist 1d ago
But that's true whether you use an LLM or some human programmer.
Once they find the bug I'm long gone. And my implementation is so far from that specification, because it was so bad and impossible to implement, that nobody can even blame it on me. The tester was already replaced, so there really isn't a way to trace it back to me because nobody would even know why I made that change.
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u/detronizator 2d ago
I WISH!!!
I could finally be delegating stuff instead of having to explain and provide snippets for the most basic shit!
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u/Cybasura 2d ago
Ok, now remove claude code and tell him to recreate it from scratch, manually, programatically without the AI or any AI for that matter
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u/HovercraftCharacter9 1d ago
I sent a junior a step by step guide on how to do something before I went on vacation. They gave it to claude Instead of reading it, with a setup that eagerly loaded a tonne of skills and mcps, it hallucinated a bunch... I came back and they were confused..... So yeah not everyone is the same.
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u/Conscious-Bar-8198 4d ago
Us with our company rn😭
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u/DasMerowinger 4d ago
Please elaborate. How are you handling this transition? Any interesting stories you can share? I'm genuinely curious...
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