Request to Tech Leads to teach Juniors the fundamentals now more than ever. I’ve seen a disturbing trend where Juniors and mid-level devs are using LLM’s to generate PR’s where they didn’t hand code any of it, and upon questioning, they don’t understand much of it. When I then explain things in the PR and/or in person, I realize they’re missing swaths of basics, and while exciting for me, it’s concerning they’ve gone this long without someone giving them the rundown of how this all works.
This results in months of building software, but not learning much about building software. This also results in TONS of PR changes requested, and PR’s, even with an AI to help review the PR’s, now go from weeks to months to get merged.
You can see this reflected in this chart from the ArsTechnica article where with AI the number of PR’s goes up, and so too does the number of requested changes. Correlation does not equal causation, no doubt, but I’ve seen it myself, so it resonates and seems a legit finding.
I have a feeling they’re also doing multiple of these large batch, slop grenades at once because they’re waiting on reviews from exhausted Tech Leads / co-workers to review (haven’t checked out their Github profile to conform, tho). The co-workers/Tech Leads are exhausted because:
- there are more PR’s
- the PR’s are larger batch
- the code _looks_ ok at first, but you realize it’s missing fundamental architecture/types/testing good practices, so you have to be on your A game when reviewing.
- This repeated high-intensity of review tires you out.
- When done, there are twice as many PR’s like this to go.
Lose-lose for both sides here. Some devs will just tap out, exhausted and “LGTM”. That doesn’t help anybody.
Automation Bias is a thing; people who don’t know a subject well think AI can automate it. In this case Juniors are using a lot of tokens to produce little, usable code.
Microsoft’s Justin Reock, in Developer Experience shared their latest data showing that Juniors use more tokens than Seniors to get the same result. Pre-AI, the data showed the code Seniors wrote tended to last longer whereas code Juniors wrote was changed a lot. That same rule holds now, but the changes have skyrocketed because it’s much easier & faster for them to generate code they don’t understand.
I know many of us feel like the Phoenix from the original X-Men movie when she’s holding back the lakes worth of water WHILE lifting a jet.
You’re trying to help people WHILE not dying yourself. It’s rough. Just know, currently, these AI’s aren’t learning and are making some things worse. However, your efforts on _people_ are worth it; they learn, the slop gets less, and after a couple of months, they can help you. Keep going.
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