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raw_anon_1111HNSource author
Lessons learnedExperience excerpt · English

Or do the same for IAC - same surface area - and use Terraform on one project, CloudFormation on …

… Or do the same for IAC - same surface area - and use Terraform on one project, CloudFormation on another, and the CDK on a third and to generate code for you when you give them the correct architecture. It took me a day to do that before AI depending on the architectural complexity and I know AWS well (trust me on this). How long would it take me to delegate that to a junior dev? It took ChatGPT 2 minutes before I started using Claude just by my pasting a well labeled architecture diagram and explaining the goal. It took me about 8 hours total to vibe code an internal web tool with a lot of features that if I had estimated before AI, I would have said a mid level developer would have taken two weeks at least. It wasn’t complex - just a CRUD app with Cognito authentication. How long would it have taken a junior developer?

Original discussionAI is making junior devs useless382 source comments · at import
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BL
BlackthornHN

Some of you folks think way too highly of yourselves. Junior devs are awesome. You tell them what needs doing, if it's not well defined you have them write a document to figure it out, and then they churn away at it and will often surprise you with a brilliant solution. Meanwhile, I've never once seen a coding agent give a brilliant solution or design to just about anything, and anything with the barest whiff of undefined-ness will simply zero in on your existing biases. This whole thread reads like absolute insanity to me. I love getting new junior devs. They do great work.

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BL
BlackthornHN

Design a concurrency implementation? I sure hope they would spend more than 3 minutes on it! Concurrency lends itself to subtle bugs even when experts write it. I'd gladly take a junior dev to do any of that work there, because they can think for themself and not hang onto any bias you unknowingly build into the prompt like it's a religion.

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SK
skydhashHN

The one reason I can't care about these kind of arguments is that you're describing the solution, not the problem. Based on my career (maybe shorter than yours), usually you put juniors on projects of low complexity and low impact while you play the mentor role. It's not about them being a productive worker or a menial helper, it's for them to train using practical projects. Your problems don't look like suitable projects unless you want them to train them in copy-pasta from the Internet.

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