I mostly share Josh's opinion, but I think a lot of these posts that talk about Senior vs. Junior experience when working with AIs is kind of rubbish. Sure, you get better results as a Senior working with AI tooling and struggle more as a Junior. Nothing has changed in that equation except the amplification.

What folks seem to avoid is that a Junior (in ANY subject) has the ability to LEARN so much faster with an AI research assistant, and that becoming an expert has accelerated for those with the personal stamina to dig deep (this as a requirement hasn't changed). I spend just as much time with my AI tooling asking questions as I do asking it to "build" or "fix" things. "How does this work?". "Can you suggest other tools?".

I think some people always think about AI as an input / output relationship, when a lot of the time, the fiddling in between, with or without AI was always the important part. Yes people will suck in the beginning, against they always did. I think the good folks though will suck for a MUCH shorter time than I did getting into things.

A lot of people will drop out and get discouraged. That happened before too. Learning things requires persistence. I think the only real case to be made is that AI's sense of immediate pleasure can neuter people away from running into friction. AI natives likely won't understand friction and question it.

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xxs 18 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

> has the ability to LEARN so much faster with an AI research assistant, and that becoming an expert has accelerated for those with the personal stamina to dig deep (this as a requirement hasn't changed)

If anything it allows to be as lazy as possible. I have not seen anyone digging deeper with the AI tools.

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JumpCrisscross an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> a Junior (in ANY subject) has the ability to LEARN so much faster with an AI research assistant

I’m not seeing this. And based on what we’re seeing at the university level, I’m not expecting to.

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sonofhans an hour ago | parent [-]

Yes, I agree, the skills are orthogonal. Digital typesetting is vastly quicker than manually putting down metal type, and since you’re exposed to more type you have the opportunity to learn faster. But getting good at typography with digital tools will help you very little if you need to lay out type manually.

	▲	JumpCrisscross an hour ago \| parent [-]
		> getting good at typography with digital tools will help you very little if you need to lay out type manually The analogy is unlimited typing in Gmail won’t make you a better writer or typesetter on its own.

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renticulous 25 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

There are other axes as well.

Companies with AI will move faster than those without.

AI itself could subsume what we collectively consider as Engineering Taste.

AI is faster at what it does. So even if a junior costs less on his own than AI. Paying extra for AI means gaining first mover advantage.

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justinhj 10 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Smart, motivated juniors have incredible tools to amplify their learning and capabilities.

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runarberg an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

> a Junior (in ANY subject) has the ability to LEARN so much faster with an AI research assistant

This is a testable hypotheses with severe lack of citations. Intuition would argue the opposite. We learn by using our brains, if we offload the thinking to a machine and copy their output we don‘t learn. A child does not learn multiplication by using a calculator, and a language learner will not learn a new language by machine translating every sentence. In both cases all they’ve learnt is using a tool to do what they skipped learning.

	▲	jononor 11 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		As a precondition I think we have to assume that the person in question 1) wants to learn and 2) is smart enough to absorb new info and apply it and 3) reflects enough to adjust their approach when hitting bottlenecks or making mistakes 4) has a drive to create. Without these, self driven learning is not viable - and that has very little to do with AI. For such a person, I believe AI can be very empowering for learning. Like Google, wikipedia and stack overflow, Arxiv before it - AI tools give access to a lot of information. It allows to quickly dig deep into any topic you can imagine. And yes, the quality is variable - so one needs to find ways to filter and synthesize from imperfect info. But that was also the case before. Furthermore AI tools can be used to find holes in arguments or a paper. And by coding one can use it to test out things in practice. These are also powerful (albeit imperfect) learning tools. But they will not apply themselves.