Dealing with an intern at work who I suspect is doing exactly this, I discussed this with a colleague. One way seems to be to organize a face to face meeting where you test their problem solving skills without AI use, the other may be to question them about their thought process as you review a PR.

Unfortunately, the use of LLMs has brought about a lot of mistrust in the workplace. Earlier you’d simply assume that a junior making mistakes is simply part of being a junior and can be coached; whereas nowadays said junior may not be willing to take your advice as they see it as sermonizing when an “easy” process to get “acceptable” results exists.

There are some definite signs of over reliance on AI. From emojis in comments, to updates completely unrelated to the task at hand, if you ask "why did you make this change?", you'll typically get no answer.

I don't mind if AI is used as a tool, but the output needs to be vetted.

Is/was copy/pasting from Stackoverflow considered harmful? You have a problem, you do a web search and you find someone who asked the same question on SO, and there's often a solution.

You might be specifically talking about people who copy/paste without understanding, but I think it's still OK-ish to do that, since you can't make an entire [whatever you're coding up] by copy/pasting snippets from SO like you're cutting words out of a magazine for a ransom note. There's still thought involved, so it's more like training wheels that you eventually outgrow as you get more understanding.

Pair programming! Get hands-on with your junior engineers and their development process. Push them to think through things and not just ask the LLM everything.

Just like anything, anyone who did the work themself should be able to speak intelligently about the work and the decisions behind its idiosyncrasies.

For software, I can imagine a process where junior developers create a PR and then run through it with another engineer side by side. The short-term incentive would be that they can do it, else they'd get exposed.

having dealt with a few people who just copy/pasted Stackoverflow I really feel that using an LLM is an improvement.

That is at least for the people who don't understand what they're doing, the LLM tends to come out with something I can at least turn into something useful.

It might be reversed though for people who know what they're doing. IF they know what they're doing they might theoretically be able to put together some stackoverflow results that make sense, and build something up from that better than what gets generated from LLM (I am not asserting this would happen, and thinking it might be the case)

However I don't know as I've never known anyone who knew what they were doing who also just copy/pasted some stackoverflow or delegated to LLM significantly.

> Is there any way to distinguish between these two categories?

Yes, it should be obvious. At least at the current state of LLMs.

> There's the long term incentive, but is there a short term one?

The short term incentive is keeping their job.