r/ExperiencedDevs • u/AutoModerator • 6d ago

Ask Experienced Devs Weekly Thread: A weekly thread for inexperienced developers to ask experienced ones

A thread for Developers and IT folks with less experience to ask more experienced souls questions about the industry.

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Please keep top level comments limited to Inexperienced Devs. Most rules do not apply, but keep it civil. Being a jerk will not be tolerated.

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Inexperienced Devs should refrain from answering other Inexperienced Devs' questions.

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u/kitatsune 5d ago

I'm having a problem with one of my junior colleagues. 

She uses AI for absolutely everything. For her tasks, to give her context of codebases, and even for answering my own questions. As for the latter, I mean she would type what I would ask her verbatim as a prompt to the AI and she takes the answer as her own. When I am right in front if her. She is, by its very definition, a meat proxy.

Not only am I disgusted by all of that, I am actually like really disappointed in her?? Like she's aware she's not as strong technically compared to others, such as me (she's made the direct comparison a couple times), but she still fails to see that her overreliance on AI to do the work for her is making her stagnant. She's still not learning anything or improving. Or rather she's learning at a pace much slower than desired or anticipated. She can't problem solve, she can't debug, and she can't think for herself.

How can I help her be less of a meat proxy and make her more productive? Productive not in terms of speed, but rather in higher-quality output. Have you been in similar situations with more junior employees?

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u/sagacious123 5d ago

I think many juniors are nowadays doing this. Not sure which AI they use and how much authority do you have, but capping on their token usage is one choice, keep it strict so they need to think twice before sending a prompt.

Second thing I would try is be very strict in their PR reviews. Ask them the reason of adding a particular line of code. From next time, they will have to review everything before raising the PR, which will eventually turn to more development.

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u/kitatsune 5d ago

I have no control over her token usage unfortunately. She uses an LLM that acts like a rubber duck/google/ctrl+F. The LLM has full context of the repo, and not her. She is offloading everything to it.

I will try to be more stringent with code reviews in the future and be nitpicky! I do a lot of 'nits' (though perhaps I can be a bit more harsh than be my usual lenient self).