An agent can produce code quickly, but at the accuracy level of a co-op unless a significant amount of time is spent to “prepare” the agent. Trouble is, you have to know how to do the job you’re asking the agent to do to be able to effectively steer it to an acceptable solution.
With a co-op (or junior engineer), I still need to do the equivalent of the above to train them on the tasks/concepts they need to perform their work, I still need to have a firm grasp of what it is that I’m asking them to do to be able to guide them to the correct solution.
The difference is that the co-op/junior retains that knowledge and is able to extrapolate that to different situations as well as come up with innovative solutions based on that initial knowledge. One of the biggest risks to tech work from LLMs (aside from the general problems with LLMs) is it encourages managers to not hire juniors/co-ops, which means that there will be no new generation of senior developers coming up to replace us when we retire (lol, as if).
I want to push this outside engineering. It sounds like they want to train computers, not employees. Which, I don’t know about your fields, but folk aren’t exactly looking to mentor their future competition in the financial industry. So you pretty much get to teach yourself or go back to school.
Historically (at least in orgs that aren’t maximally toxic) software engineering has actually had a great culture of seniors helping Junior and midlevels grow. IME most of us enjoy mentoring, and further enjoy having someone else who can do the boring shit for us. It’s why, despite incompetent management being the norm, the industry has succeeded as much as it has.
Unfortunately I think this is changing now. The ownership class has finally pushed too far and I think a sizeable portion of us have realized that we devs have to stop maintaining the engineering cultures of our orgs to fight back.
An agent can produce code quickly, but at the accuracy level of a co-op unless a significant amount of time is spent to “prepare” the agent. Trouble is, you have to know how to do the job you’re asking the agent to do to be able to effectively steer it to an acceptable solution.
With a co-op (or junior engineer), I still need to do the equivalent of the above to train them on the tasks/concepts they need to perform their work, I still need to have a firm grasp of what it is that I’m asking them to do to be able to guide them to the correct solution.
The difference is that the co-op/junior retains that knowledge and is able to extrapolate that to different situations as well as come up with innovative solutions based on that initial knowledge. One of the biggest risks to tech work from LLMs (aside from the general problems with LLMs) is it encourages managers to not hire juniors/co-ops, which means that there will be no new generation of senior developers coming up to replace us when we retire (lol, as if).
I want to push this outside engineering. It sounds like they want to train computers, not employees. Which, I don’t know about your fields, but folk aren’t exactly looking to mentor their future competition in the financial industry. So you pretty much get to teach yourself or go back to school.
Historically (at least in orgs that aren’t maximally toxic) software engineering has actually had a great culture of seniors helping Junior and midlevels grow. IME most of us enjoy mentoring, and further enjoy having someone else who can do the boring shit for us. It’s why, despite incompetent management being the norm, the industry has succeeded as much as it has.
Unfortunately I think this is changing now. The ownership class has finally pushed too far and I think a sizeable portion of us have realized that we devs have to stop maintaining the engineering cultures of our orgs to fight back.