I’ve found that junior devs can be incredibly creative and produce seemingly high-level code that they don’t fully understand. Results are often bad because they didn’t consider tradeoffs but still, pretty interesting code. Even before LLMs were a thing, so I wouldn’t attribute it to ChatGPT.
I agree, and in fact I would consider working with junior developers a highlight of my day because there is an inherent virtue in the "beginners mind". And you're not wrong that juniors writing things that seem more complicated than they have any right to be producing is not a new thing. It's more that the patterns have skewed. Over a nearly 20 year career, I've developed pattern matching skills that can catch this kind of code...when produced by humans. It seems that I'll have to adjust my priors now. That's all.
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I’ve found that junior devs can be incredibly creative and produce seemingly high-level code that they don’t fully understand. Results are often bad because they didn’t consider tradeoffs but still, pretty interesting code. Even before LLMs were a thing, so I wouldn’t attribute it to ChatGPT.
I agree, and in fact I would consider working with junior developers a highlight of my day because there is an inherent virtue in the "beginners mind". And you're not wrong that juniors writing things that seem more complicated than they have any right to be producing is not a new thing. It's more that the patterns have skewed. Over a nearly 20 year career, I've developed pattern matching skills that can catch this kind of code...when produced by humans. It seems that I'll have to adjust my priors now. That's all.