Mastodawn

My job as a senior developer with a team of juniors is to figure out what to write, sketch a PoC as guidance, and then delegate the actual implementation to them. I'm going to look at that, explain misunderstandings or poor style choices, and guide them into implementing something that meets our standards.

I don't think LLMs can do my job yet. But I think we're getting shockingly close to them being able to do the other part. And I'm worried how we're going to get more senior developers.

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Greg Mar 7

@mjg59 every mid-to-large FOSS project is seeing their "Good First Issue"s getting sniped by 20 LLM bots. Those exist to feed new contributors into dedicated ones. If you cut the bottom rungs off the ladder, how is anyone going to be able to get to the top?

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Matthew Garrett Mar 7

@greg yeah, exactly. I've helped people turn into senior devs, I don't know how to turn an LLM into one - embodying good taste is a different problem to generating code that meets a functional description

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Paul McMillan Mar 7

@mjg59 @greg I agree wholeheartedly with the junior pipeline problem, though I suspect that we end up with junior devs who are good at piloting the models, and learn to debug even hard problems within that context.

We didn't stop being able to computer when people stopped learning assembly or c, I hope we have a similar outcome here.

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Tim Ward ⭐🇪🇺🔶 #FBPE

@PaulM @mjg59 @greg There was a time when I wouldn't hire people to write Visual Basic unless they'd done some assembler. Just a few hours at college would do, but at least they'd then learn what a computer was. Otherwise you could end up with people with no comprehension that two almost identical looking lines of could could differ in performance by several orders of magnitude, because they'd have no clues as to what might be going on under the hood.