New Junior Developers Can’t Actually Code.
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 wh...
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.
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.
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.
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.