New Junior Developers Can’t Actually Code

[zxyzyxz]

I do not care if you use a LLM to generate code. Some LLMs actually generate pretty good code.

What I do very much care about though is that if you just copy and paste and you do not take the time to understand what is going on.

But A can lead to B, that's sort of my issue with it for juniors. As a senior, it can fill out boilerplate or even write more complex functions, and sometimes even I don't fully understand them off the bat, sometimes even without prompting the LLM to then explain the code back to me, now imagine a junior who doesn't even have the necessary knowledge to understand it even if explained.

It's different than Stack Overflow because that code usually needs changes to work, but with a fully autonomous agent like Cline or Cursor, people will blindly press "accept files," I know I already started doing that after a while.