alt Hacker NewsI mostly share Josh's opinion, but I think a lot of these posts that talk about Senior vs. Junior experience when working with AIs is kind of rubbish. Sure, you get better results as a Senior working with AI tooling and struggle more as a Junior. Nothing has changed in that equation except the amplification.
What folks seem to avoid is that a Junior (in ANY subject) has the ability to LEARN so much faster with an AI research assistant, and that becoming an expert has accelerated for those with the personal stamina to dig deep (this as a requirement hasn't changed). I spend just as much time with my AI tooling asking questions as I do asking it to "build" or "fix" things. "How does this work?". "Can you suggest other tools?".
I think some people always think about AI as an input / output relationship, when a lot of the time, the fiddling in between, with or without AI was always the important part. Yes people will suck in the beginning, against they always did. I think the good folks though will suck for a MUCH shorter time than I did getting into things.
A lot of people will drop out and get discouraged. That happened before too. Learning things requires persistence. I think the only real case to be made is that AI's sense of immediate pleasure can neuter people away from running into friction. AI natives likely won't understand friction and question it.
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> What folks seem to avoid is that a Junior (in ANY subject) has the ability to LEARN so much faster with an AI research assistant,
You don't learn by reading, you learn by doing.
In this case, simply reading the output of an LLM isn't going to substantially educate you.
> a Junior (in ANY subject) has the ability to LEARN so much faster with an AI research assistant
I’m not seeing this. And based on what we’re seeing at the university level, I’m not expecting to.
> has the ability to LEARN so much faster with an AI research assistant, and that becoming an expert has accelerated for those with the personal stamina to dig deep (this as a requirement hasn't changed)
If anything it allows to be as lazy as possible. I have not seen anyone digging deeper with the AI tools.
> a Junior (in ANY subject) has the ability to LEARN so much faster with an AI research assistant
This is a testable hypotheses with severe lack of citations. Intuition would argue the opposite. We learn by using our brains, if we offload the thinking to a machine and copy their output we don‘t learn. A child does not learn multiplication by using a calculator, and a language learner will not learn a new language by machine translating every sentence. In both cases all they’ve learnt is using a tool to do what they skipped learning.
There are other axes as well.
Companies with AI will move faster than those without.
AI itself could subsume what we collectively consider as Engineering Taste.
AI is faster at what it does. So even if a junior costs less on his own than AI. Paying extra for AI means gaining first mover advantage.
> that becoming an expert has accelerated for those with the personal stamina to dig deep (this as a requirement hasn't changed)
This is a contradictory statement imo.
Digging deep still takes the same amount of time it used to. AI accelerates the surface level (badly, tbh), it doesn't accelerate digging deep. Becoming an expert still takes time and effort, there really aren't shortcuts.
To torture the Iron Man metaphor a bit. If you're not an expert without the AI, then you're not an expert with it.
Smart, motivated juniors have incredible tools to amplify their learning and capabilities.
>I think the only real case to be made is that AI's sense of immediate pleasure can neuter people away from running into friction. AI natives likely won't understand friction and question it.
This is key, I think, and gets overshadowed by people being offended by seeing bad vibecode or claims of 10x speeds, etc.
The most important learning that happens is not when we ask and get the answer to our question right away. It's when we stretch ourselves to seek out the answer, fail a few times, think deeply, then perhaps after a nap, solve the problem. That kind of knowledge is priceless because it not only gets you an answer it gets you some errant paths you can use to avoid problems in future problem solving as well as getting you increased trust in your own thinking.
If the next generations skip this step, they'll always think answers are supposed to be easy to find and will find themselves more and more dependent on AI and less and less confident in their own brains.