That's my anecdotal experience as well! Junior devs struggle with a lot of things:

- syntax

- iteration over an idea

- breaking down the task and verifying each step

Working with a tool like Claude that gets them started quick and iterate the solution together with them helps them tremendously and educate them on best practices in the field.

Contrast that with a seasoned developer with a domain experience, good command of the programming language and knowledge of the best practices and a clear vision of how the things can be implemented. They hardly need any help on those steps where the junior struggled and where the LLMs shine, maybe some quick check on the API, but that's mostly it. That's consistent with the finding of the study https://metr.org/blog/2025-07-10-early-2025-ai-experienced-o... that experienced developers' performance suffered when using an LLM.

What I used as a metaphor before to describe this phenomena is training wheels: kids learning how to ride a bike can get the basics with the help and safety of the wheels, but adults that already can ride a bike don't have any use for the training wheels, and can often find restricted by them.

> that experienced developers' performance suffered when using an LLM

That experiment is really non significant. A bunch of OSS devs without much training in the tools used them for very little time and found it to be a net negative.