Recently I gave my first ever presentation at iO. It was about what it actually feels like to be a junior developer in a world where AI is just always there. This is a write-up of that talk, including what the room said back.
The Google-versus-AI point in there is the one I’d hold onto. Searching made you read three wrong answers before the right one, and the wrong ones were where you learned what the problem actually was. Getting the answer straight away skips that without it feeling like anything is missing.
What I’d say to a junior is to keep reviewing the diff properly rather than reading the summary of it. Reading code you didn’t write is worth getting good at either way, and reviewing agent output gives you more practice at it than any job I’ve had before.
Are we human, or are we Dancer?
The workflow was: Google it, find Stack Overflow, maybe actually read the documentation (said as a joke, but not really).
Anyone that says this is not good at their job in the first place. I (and other actually competent devs I’ve talked to about it) have always gone straight to official documentation first. Stack overflow has its place, but it is not the first place to research.
I (and other actually competent devs I’ve talked to about it) have always gone straight to official documentation first.
This is silly posturing. Anyone that is troubleshooting a problem tends to start by googling the error message, and more often than not Google will return SO hits, not official documentation.
Is that because you didn’t bother to read the documentation before using product X, and now you encountered some issue because you used X incorrectly?
After years of using SO, then years of going to docs first, I’ve started going back to SO. It just tends to be faster. You can find a question that is 90% similar to yours, rather than piece together scattered bits of information across pages and pages of docs.
I agree you can find an answer quickly on SO. And you can find it even faster by asking an AI. But you will not have learned much, if anything, by copy/pasting the answer. As opposed to reading the documentation, which might have taught you how to solve similar issues in the future.
But you will not have learned much, if anything, by copy/pasting the answer.
Your ignorance is showing. The whole point of using SO to help troubleshoot problems is avoiding the troubleshooting stage and all the iterative work of cross-checking docs with parametric tests. The main deliverable of SO is not a magical code snippet but a root cause analysis on a particular failure. You end up with a nice summary of someone else’s prior work troubleshooting the same issue, and a clear indication that X causes Y because of Foo.
And you do not get that by reading official docs documenting the happy flow. You’d know that if you had any relevant experience developing software.
Your comment shows some ignorance mixed with lack of experience. Errors do happen due to many reasons, and there is no project on earth that is nearly as documented as you pretend them all to be. This is one of the reasons why googling for error messages ended up being a very basic and mundane technique in software engineering.
What makes your comment stand out is the fact that you are completely unaware that some projects even use Stack Overflow to help users troubleshoot issues, with project maintainers taking the lead in providing answers. But here you are, pretending that reading docs is a silver bullet
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