AI is filling "narrow" gaps. In the case of seniors these are:

-techs they understand but still not master. AI aids with implementation details only experts knowb about

- No time for long coding tasks. It aids with fast implementations and automatic tests.

- No time for learning techs that adress well understood problems. Ai helps with quick intros, fast demos and solver of learners' misunderstandings

In essence, in seniors it impacts productivity

In the case of juniors AI fills the gaps too. But these are different from seniors' and AI does not excell in them because gaps are wider and broader

- Understand the problems of the business domain. AI helps but not that much.

- Understand how the organization works. AI is not very helpful here.

- Learn the techs to be used. AI helps but it doesn't know how to guide a junior in a specific organisational context and specific business domain.

In essence it helps, but not that much because the gaps are wider and more difficult to fill

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fxj 11 hours ago | parent | next [-]

In my experience AI is wikipedia/stackoverflow on steroids when I need to know something about a field I dont know much about. It has nice explanations and you can ask for examples or scenarios and it will tell you what you didnt understand.

Only when you know about the basic notions in the field you want to work with AI can be productive. This is not only valid for coding but also for other fields in science and humanities.

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lazide 10 hours ago | parent [-]

Except stackoverflow was only occasionally hallucinating entire libraries.

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xandrius 9 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

As opposed to SO always somehow ending up giving an answer where boost or jQuery was the top answer.

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Den_VR 8 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Perhaps asking the machine to do your job for you isn’t as effective asking the machine to help you think like a senior and find the information you need to do the job yourself.

	▲	jayd16 23 minutes ago \| parent \| next [-]
		If we're just back to I do the work and use a search engine, why futz with AI?
	▲	lazide 3 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		When you ask it for information and it just makes it up (like I just described), how is that helping the senior? I’ve literally asked for details about libraries I know exist by name, and had every llm I’ve tried (Claude, Gemini Pro, ChatGPT) just make shit up that sounded about right, but was actually just-wrong-enough-to-lead-me-on-a-useless-rabbit-hole-search. At least most people on stackoverflow saying that kind of thing were somewhat obviously kind of dumb or didn’t know what they were doing. Like function calls with wrong args (or spelled slightly differently), capitalization being wrong (but one of the ‘okay’ ways), wrong paths and includes.

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KolibriFly 13 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Feels like we're seeing AI accelerate those who already know where they're going, while leaving the early-stage learners still needing the same human guidance they always did.