Lately it feels like it's possible. Freshers in their first job are now capable of taking ownership and shipping full stack features in a few weeks. The feedback loop is definitely shortened - noone appreciates the years spent "googling and looking at stackoverflow" anymore, and frankly, they shouldn't be. Experience matters now mostly at the architecture, and decision-making levels, not at implementation.
I was reviewing some code done by a junior hire at my company last week, and it certainly didn't look like he was cramming 25 years into 2. It looked like he had no understanding of anything he had generated, because it was garbage. Meanwhile this week I've just reviewed the largest single PR I've ever seen, from a senior dev who disclosed it was mostly generated and cleaned up by him, and the code was perfectly fine and it was a breeze to review.
LLMs are a great tool, but more often than not it does show if the person using them knows what they're doing or not pretty clearly. Especially if it's anything larger than a trivial small change.
Yeah they seem to just amplify who ever was behind it.
Freshers certainly can give the appearance of taking ownership and shipping full stack features in a few weeks.
The problem is that "I copied the issue on claude code and then committed the code it produced" is not actually taking ownership.
> noone appreciates the years spent "googling and looking at stackoverflow" anymore, and frankly, they shouldn't be.
Well, I do, and I hard disagree with you there. If the human does not understand what the machine is producing, then I need a different human.
Every time i see a comment chain like this i'm annoyed. In the last 3 decades we never truly found the words to define what kind of skills, problems, and people /-space exist in the industry, and AI has literally added a whole axis to the space so we're more unable to communicate than ever.
Having said that, and feeling more with you than the other guy, there is nothing for you to "disagree" with.
Mediocre was always buggy and broken in some ways, but for all intents and purposes it was good enough. Today somebody with a year of study can reasonably deploy something - for which the appearance of taking ownership and shipping a full stack of features has reached the bar of good enough.
Consider 10 years ago: Did you believe it was more likely that in the quality-distribution-of-software that we would, over time, create proportionally more quality? I dont think so and AI didn't meaningfully change the trend.
It changed the work dynamics, and still is changing, and with our inability to communicate is going to be an annoying mess.
Dont let the annoyances blind you to what LLMs can do for your point in space, or to where most of the points lie for the rest of the world.
I was disagreeing with "they shouldn't be".
I think we should care that our engineers have put the effort to understand the code they are responsible to produce. I don't care specifically about how they get that knowledge (I am using AI to learn myself, for example). But I disagree with the implicit assumption on the statement, which is, in my view, "humans don't need to understand the code any more" (because some fresh out of university might think they understand, but they really don't).
The problem with AI isn't that it's mediocre, I can work with mediocre. The problem with AI is that it produces absolutely stellar world-class code with two hidden 0days in it.
I can't work with that sort of surprise. I'm tuned to consistency, and I can work with consistently bad, but not with "95% absolutely amazing, 5% abysmal".
And I say this as someone who develops exclusively with LLMs now.
> it produces absolutely stellar world-class code
I am using Claude Code with Opus 4.5 and I have to correct it every day. It produces working code but it makes mistakes. The code is more verbose than it should be, misunderstands/ignores edge cases, etc. Daily.
And I am not a stellar world-class programmer. I am pretty average. I just read what it produces.
> I just read what it produces.
I don't think that's average right now.
With junior programmers I typically just look for high level patterns that are commonly wrong. Sure if they are touching our cross thread communications code I need to spend a lot of time on that because it is so complex nobody gets it right - but we only have a tiny amount of that and most people look at it and run the opposite way (even me - I wrote it but I still do my best not to touch it when I can avoid it - that is hard hard hard)
I'm not talking about some hypotethical scenario - but what I observe. When I started out, us interns were tasked with "nothing". Now the skill floor is so much higher, and I'm seeing freshers accomplish tasks that were previously thought of strong mid-level or early senior ones.
Well that is not my experience. My first task as an intern, decades ago, was performing a useful task for the company that hired me. I did a mediocre job at it and it took me way longer than it would take one of the experienced engineers there, who would have done it better. That was expected because I was an intern.
With the tools available now, I would have been able to produce things of higher quality and faster, I don't deny that. But putting that code in production without an experienced developer reviewing it thoroughly would have been reckless. And they would have been the owners of that code, not me.