>I tell them to try to find what part of the code doesn't work before generating the fix

this makes me kinda sad. they don't do this on their own? are they not even a little curious

mechazawa 6 days ago | parent | next [-]

even before AI very few developers cared about the actual craft. I'd say only about 3%. For a lot of people it's just a job, no matter if it's a corperate dev or a startup dev.

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finaard 4 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

One of my customers now added a policy that junior developers may use AI assistance, but are expected to write code by hand. Only proven developers can use AI to generate code, and are then expected to understand the generated code, and take ownership.

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okdood64 5 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> are they not even a little curious

Some are. Some aren't. Usually a good indicator of career trajectory.

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kqr 5 days ago | parent | prev [-]

It's a different mindset. Has nothing to do with curiosity.

For me and you, "fixing" something means finding which assumption was violated and redesigning the solution in light of that. Sometimes this means adding code, sometimes it means making the solution smaller.

For a lot of people, "fixing" means adding code to make it work. This always makes the solution larger.

The latter group can still be curious! But they're curious about which addition makes it work, not about their incorrect beliefs.

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VCFundedGenYer 5 days ago | parent | next [-]

An engineer that refuses to understand how their craft is constructed is a poor engineer.

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acuozzo 5 days ago | parent | prev [-]

> For a lot of people, "fixing" means adding code to make it work.

What if the fix requires deleting a single line of code?

Is the additive fix to enshroud it in if (0) { } ?

	▲	Izkata 5 days ago \| parent \| next [-]
		What I saw in these cases, the result was a few levels removed from the root cause and they'd add the same workaround to like 5 different places (and miss one or two) instead of tracking it back to the origin where the fix was that simple.
	▲	kqr 5 days ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Usually something more subtle like adding an early return somewhere before the offending line, or inheriting from that class and blanking that method, or something along those lines.