alt Hacker NewsI think the biggest challenge now becomes how more seasoned engineers teach juniors. The AI makes the ramp a lot easier but you still do best when you understand the whole stack and make mistakes.
It’s damned near impossible to figure out where to spend your time wisely to correct an assumption a human made vs. an AI on a blended pull request. All of the learning that happens during PR review is at risk in this way and I’m not sure where we will get it back yet. (Outside of an AI telling you - which, to be fair, there are some good review bots out there)
Junior engineers now learn from AIs. And AIs now learn from RL cost functions. And RL cost functions are being set by PhDs, with little to no production grade engineering experience ;)
The result is interesting. First, juniors are miserable. What used to be a good experience coding and debugging, in a state of flow is now anxiously waiting if an AI could do it or not.
And senior devs are also miserable, getting apprentices used to be fun and profit, working with someone young is uplifting, and now it is gone.
The code quality is going down, Zen cycle interrupted, with the RL cost functions now at the top.
The only ones who are happy are hapless PhDs ;$