This is something I've been thinking about the last couple days: how to get junior engineers to be valuable.

I developed a system to help prepare for leet coding interviews so I never feel lost under pressure solving a problem again. It is like a debugger that steps through the code showing all the values of all the variables with data visualizations that reflect the logic so I can grok what it is doing. [0]

After I had the Claude build it, I started looking at the values and there were some mistakes. So, again, the coding agent ran all the code, recorded all the values, and made sure that they line up.

Here is the really cool thing about that. The coding agents can't be trusted. By observing the values stepping though, what I really was doing was debugging coding agent code. It is debugging code presented in a way that is extremely simplified.

What I've been thinking about yesterday and today is, can I do the same thing with a pull request? Have the coding agent run the code, capture all the values, and create a console for the reviewer to step through looking at with data visualizations that abstractly represent that code.

Two things. 1. Coding agents can't be trusted and 2. reviewing code is very difficult. But is it possible to use coding agents to make reviewing code easy for humans? I think so.

That would be a great way for junior engineers to be extremely useful. They only have to step through the code and make sure that all the values line up.

[0] https://adamsohn.com/algoviz/

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WhyIsItAlwaysHN 3 days ago | parent | next [-]

Is this just an ad for the product? How is this connected specifically to junior engineers? Is it implying that they cannot debug code without this kind of tool while more experienced people can?

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dataviz1000 3 days ago | parent [-]

There is no product!

Yesterday claude code built a console that steps through algorithms: one shot. There was a bug with a value being incorrect. I thought this would be a great way to automated visualizing and stepping through code during a PR review.

I'm sitting in a room with a computer by myself where I was thinking yesterday about a way that AI can add value to junior engineers. I see a post and discussion about junior engineer's value so I shared what I'm think and working on.

Hopefully I'm contributing to the conversation here and I can get feedback good or bad about how to approach improving junior engineer's value.

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WhyIsItAlwaysHN 3 days ago | parent [-]

I think this is good in general for being able to see what happens in the code of a PR, but probably more so to seniors.

If anything will be missing from juniors it will be the ability to run code in their heads if they've only written code via AI.

	▲	dataviz1000 3 days ago \| parent [-]
		I'm having a hard time justifying writing any code today. In a fraction of time it takes me to solve any 20 - 40 line code problem, a coding agent can solve it 10 different ways in python and in TypeScript, inject performance logging, run each in 1,000,000 iterations with as many permutations as inputs, write comments at a 10th grade reading level so I understand what each does quickly, make a clean table with pros / cons and performance results, and I after considering the options choose one. The problem is that the coding agents are not dependable -- they are reliably incorrect. In the United States decades ago, a phone utility company was sued because they didn't allow women to be linemen working in the field. They lost and what they did was make changes like using lighter aluminum ladders getting rid of the heavy wooden ones, they replaced the wrenches with ones with longer handles so they had much more leverage, and many other things to make the work less physically punishing. A reporter asked some of the veteran linemen how they feel about working with the changes. The reply was, "why didn't we make these changes sooner?" None of them lost their job and their job got a whole lot easier. The problem is verifying code quality. The coding agents can't reliably do it. But they as tools, can help both juniors and seniors make their job a whole lot easier.

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0x696C6961 3 days ago | parent | prev [-]

I've dreamt about pernosco (rr) style traces being available for tests in PRs. Imagine a DST setup where the PR shows diffs of deterministic test execution traces (I have no idea what these diffs would look like)