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 what they’re shipping? That’s where things get concerning. Sure, the code works, but ask why it works that way instead of another way? Crickets. Ask about edge cases? Blank stares. The foundational knowledge that used to come from struggling through problems is just… missing. We’re trading deep understanding for quick fixes, and while it feels great in the moment, we’re going to pay for this later.
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.
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.