Agreed but the 1 year JS dev should know they're making a deal with the devil in terms of building their skillset long term.
I basically learned programming by ExpertSexchange, Google (and Altavista...), SourceForge and eventually StackOverflow + GitHub. Many people with more experience than me at the time always told me I was making a deal with the devil since I searched so much, didn't read manuals and asked so many questions instead of thinking for myself.
~15 years later, I don't think I'm worse off than my peers who stayed away from all those websites. Doing the right searches is probably as important as being able to read manuals properly today.
>I basically learned programming by ExpertSexchange, Google (and Altavista...), SourceForge and eventually StackOverflow + GitHub. Many people with more experience than me at the time always told me I was making a deal with the devil since I searched so much, didn't read manuals and asked so many questions instead of thinking for myself.
no they didn't, no one said that
i know that because i was around then and everyone was doing the same thing
also, maybe there's a difference between searching and collating answers and just copy and pasting a solution _without thinking_ at all
The jury is still out on that one.
Having a tool that’s embedded into your workflow and shows you how things can be done based on tons of example codebases could help a junior dev quite a lot to learn, not just to produce.
Like anything else with learning, that will be heavily dependent on the individual's level of motivation.
Based on the classmates I had in college who were paying to get a CS degree, I'd be surprised if many junior devs already working a paid job put much effort into learning rather than producing.
I wouldn't dismiss the implicit/subconscious aspect of learning by example that occurs when you are "just" producing.
That still comes back to motivation in my opinion. Using an LLM to generate code and using it without studying the code and understanding it will teach you very little.
I'd still expect most junior Deva that use an LLM to get their job done won't be motivated to study the generated code enough to really learn it.
A student is also only as good as the teacher, though that's a whole other can of works with LLMs.
Maybe. But I also think that ignoring AI tools will hamper your long-term skillsets, as our profession adapts to these new tools.
Why would that be the case? If anything, each successive generation of AI tools gets easier to use and requires less prompt fiddling. I picked up Cursor and was comfortable with it in 20 minutes.
I'm not sure there's much of a skillset to speak of for these tools, beyond model-specific tricks that evaporate after a few updates.
From workplace perspective, they don't have a reason to care. What they'll care about is that you're productive right now - if you won't become better dev in the future? Your issue.