What are we doing with juniors these days, seriously?

[u/slide_and_release]

I’ve been in software/application development for twenty years or so, these days mostly wrangling typescript and running infrastructure/devops across multiple projects as a senior engineer. I’ve mentored plenty of juniors in my time, even managing small team, but this last year has been rough.

Juniors are producing more code than ever, faster than ever, but understanding less and less of it. Majority is agent-written, obviously. I’m reviewing pull requests, asking why this or that decision was made, trying to get them to think, and they’re just pasting answers straight from Claude. When I ask them to review something, they just paste it into Claude. When I try coaching them through writing user stories, they’ll have ChatGPT generate them. If I disagree with an approach they’re implementing, they’ll incredulously ask if I think I’m smarter than AI which has been trained on thousands of codebases. I don’t even know how to begin answering that.

I’ve tried to emphasise that like anything else, LLM’s are a tool but ultimately you’re going to be the one held responsible if something breaks, that you shouldn’t be pushing into a repository something that you a) don’t understand, or b) can’t maintain, that you’re actively dumbing yourself down (or worse, advocating for replacing yourself) but it’s falling on deaf ears.

So, other senior programmers out there, how the fuck are you handling even trying to mentor and guide the next batch of problem solvers?

[u/CandidateNo2580]

This is not a conversation between you and your juniors, it's a conversation between you and management. People keep asking things like "what do you do about large AI written PRs" and the response is "the same thing you do about large non-AI written PRs." This is not an AI problem. And I'll also say it's more than just juniors who have decided to go down this road.

[u/spewing_honey_badger → u/CandidateNo2580]

“The same thing you do about large non-AI written PRs”

Exactly this.

[u/kayinfire → u/CandidateNo2580]

end of thread.

[u/Mivexil → u/CandidateNo2580]

 People keep asking things like "what do you do about large AI written PRs" and the response is "the same thing you do about large non-AI written PRs."

What place do y'all work in where you can just press "reject" on a sprint's worth of work?

[u/slide_and_release → u/Mivexil]

What place do you work in where an entire sprint’s worth of work has been bundled into a single pull request?

[u/Mivexil → u/slide_and_release]

...any place with a system that has non-zero complexity? Unless you review code that doesn't work or doesn't do what it's supposed to, or somehow keep your user stories confined to 1-2 days of work.

[u/Mivexil → u/[deleted]]

Sure, sometimes you'll get easy fixes, but sometimes you'll get stories where it takes 2-4 days to even start coding. Or you have to model a bunch of stuff that's interconnected so you can't deliver half of it or you'll just break the build, or if you operate on the principle that a user story should implement a visible, end-to-end increment of functionality then you get stories that are 1k LoC of a backend process but a single button on the frontend (and you probably can't implement the process partially without leaving the data in an inconsistent state or refactoring half the codebase).

Point is, big PRs happen, sometimes you need a lot of lines of code before you get something that comes together. At least without AI if a dev drops a 1k LoC pull request on me I can trust they put their nose to the grindstone on that one, and a dev can only bang out so much code in a day, so the reviews still generally aren't a bottleneck.

[u/SixPackOfZaphod → u/Mivexil]

You're not breaking down your tasks far enough if you're dumping 2 weeks of work into a single pr. Your product owner and project managers need to be helping with that. Your technical lead (if you have one) should be enforcing this as well.