I don’t really get this attitude either way. I expect my junior devs to use all the tools at their disposal, including LLMs, to solve the problems I give them. These problems are rarely so rote that an LLM can just do them- there tends to be a great deal of context building and understating what the customer wants beyond the actual coding. That is a huge part of what I’m really offloading to the junior developer, not just writing the code.
We still discuss the code when delivered and iterate. Devs still receive feed back on their solutions and are held to account if the solutions aren’t of sufficient quality. The social element is still there, we are now just also co learning how to use this new tool.
This results in short term gains of being able to deliver something quickly, but the devs who used LLMs did not learn anything.
The value for a developer is not in simply flipping a piece of code into production, it’s in learning how to find the documentation, how to dig through it to find the functions they need, how to chase down the chain of dependencies for the input and outputs, and all the other incidental exposure they get to related information they might not need for this specific request but may be relevant in the future.
While a company may not care and just wants to ship code, this is talking about what developers lose, not what companies lose. Also a company focused on this type of short term gain is losing the ability to have someone ready to find problems when the code doesn’t work as expected.
We still discuss the code when delivered and iterate. Devs still receive feed back on their solutions and are held to account if the solutions aren’t of sufficient quality. The social element is still there, we are now just also co learning how to use this new tool.