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Unpopular opinion: AI coding assistants are making junior devs WORSE
Talked to a senior dev at my company yesterday and he said the juniors he's seen can't debug a single line without copilot holding their hand. He told me 'they know how to copy code but not how to think through it' and honestly I'm starting to agree after watching my own team fumble a simple SQL query last Thursday. Has anyone else noticed new hires relying on AI way too much?
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nathan1001mo ago
I saw a study from Github last month that said devs using AI assistants wrote 26% less secure code, but they thought it was just as safe as their own work. That senior dev is right though, I watched my buddy's intern try to fix a broken join in MySQL and he kept asking the chat why his query was wrong, didn't even look at the error message first. The real scary part is these juniors never learned how to read stack traces or think through logic step by step, they just type a prompt and copy whatever comes out. Someone at a meetup told me their team had to ban copilot during code reviews because everyone was just pasting in AI blocks without understanding them, and it was causing way more bugs than it fixed.
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logan5611mo ago
People do the same thing with GPS now, zone out and drive right into a lake.
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emeryj661mo ago
My buddy Sam at a startup told me his team had a junior dev who couldn't write a basic if/else statement from scratch. The guy had used Copilot for six months straight and froze up when the internet went down for an hour. Sam made him whiteboard a FizzBuzz solution and it took him 20 minutes to get it right.
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