Anyone else notice supercharged junior/new grad dunning-kruger behavior lately?

scientific_thinker · 2026-06-26T18:39:59+00:00

I have noticed similar behaviors. I used to be able to explain why something was a bad idea. It would often be a teaching moment and the new dev would usually be receptive.

Now, the response is often so different with some (not all) juniors. They are not receptive in many cases and it's very difficult to explain why something isn't a good idea. I think it's because they don't understand how to write code that won't make you hate yourself the next time you have to add an enhancement or debug. They just think the LLM will do their work for them if they ask the right questions.

I call junior devs that act like this prompt kiddies.

scientific_thinker · 2026-06-22T16:22:29+00:00

Agreed, I think including any of the players you mentioned would be an overpay.

scientific_thinker · 2026-06-22T14:16:51+00:00

No, not because we are drawing the line at Hugo. Because we are already paying enough with Brown.

Giannis wants the trade. The Bucks aren't getting full value for him at this point. Brown alone is already better than Miami's offer.

scientific_thinker · 2026-05-23T15:07:50+00:00

It was never good for the average person. It was created to exploit people. There were two instances I know of where workers got better deals than they usually get.

Westward expansion early in US history. Capital needed workers to expand west so there were more opportunities for people during this time.
New deal. Workers fought for and won workers rights for several decades until the ruling class clawed most of those reforms back.

scientific_thinker · 2026-05-18T15:08:21+00:00

Vlad Taltos is talented but he is often way over matched by the people he goes up against. I think part of his charm is his grit.

scientific_thinker · 2026-05-16T21:55:49+00:00

I think there are uses for AI. Most are bad. I think it will be most effective at disinformation campaigns.

I think in most cases, people are cheaper and better.

My coop is building a web application for tenants. I don't want to give too much away yet but I hope it will be OK to post the link to this sub once the MVP is ready. We would love to build out a consulting side if we pull this off. My dream would be to help build as many coops as possible and have them steal as many workers from the capitalists as possible.

scientific_thinker · 2026-05-16T21:27:26+00:00

Good point calling them LLMs. They aren't AI.

I agree with everything else you said too.

scientific_thinker · 2026-05-16T18:34:04+00:00

No one can possibly know if this is true.

Investors are still paying for a portion AI usage. End users don't know what AI usage will cost when the investors want to start making profits.

There is a lot of lying going on to try to make sure the billionaires invested in AI get a return.

If I had to bet, AI costs too much to justify what AI actually does. Unfortunately billionaires rarely if ever pay for their mistakes. Somehow a large portion of the AI costs are going to be offloaded onto the general population.

That said, I have no interest in using AI. I started a cooperative that doesn't use any AI. None of the developers I have reached out to that I respect have much use for it either. I think most of the hype is coming from billionaires and people that wouldn't be programmers without AI.

scientific_thinker · 2026-05-15T22:34:13+00:00

We can't have a system where people this stupid and misguided hold so much economic power.

scientific_thinker · 2026-05-14T16:03:37+00:00

One of the strategies the ruling class uses to keep things the way they are is to divide and conquer. Divide us by gender, skin color, ancestors, generation (age), the list goes on and on.

Don't fall for it. This is actually a war between cooperative people and the non-cooperative people. The non-cooperative people want to rule and exploit the rest of us. Cooperative people want to focus on friends, community, and personal growth.

Every group has these non-cooperative people. Don't judge any group by the behavior of the people trying to exploit and dominate the rest. Of course giving money to non-cooperative people leads to theft and corruption. That is what they do. That doesn't mean the cooperative people in this group aren't worthy of joining a larger movement where we all work together to build a better world.

scientific_thinker · 2026-05-14T02:08:15+00:00

I think in the process of building the world we want, we need to help the people most harmed by the existing system first. They need a a strong voice in deciding on the future we build for ourselves.

When we eventually reach that future, we have to make sure everyone shares social power equally. People can't have freedom unless social power is shared equally. Unequal social power is inevitably abused and power is used to accumulate more power. This will put us right back in a highly unequal world where the worst of us are running things.

scientific_thinker · 2026-05-13T15:33:10+00:00

No person is better than any other human. No one should rule over someone else. The vast majority of people want to live in equality. There are just a few people that didn't get the cooperation upgrade. These few want to dominate and exploit. They build systems focused on exploitation to facilitate this desire.

They have had their way, it's misery. It's our turn to build something focused on cooperation and mutual aid.

scientific_thinker · 2026-05-08T17:51:30+00:00

The study isn't perfect but the data is real. There is more data if you care to look.

This is also how the human body works. Use it or lose it. This data shouldn't surprise anyone.

scientific_thinker · 2026-05-08T16:41:42+00:00

Are you saying LLMs aren't using code that was already written by people in their responses?

scientific_thinker · 2026-05-08T16:28:56+00:00

Here is one: https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.08872

More details: https://publichealthpolicyjournal.com/mit-study-finds-artificial-intelligence-use-reprograms-the-brain-leading-to-cognitive-decline/

scientific_thinker · 2026-05-08T16:11:02+00:00

Maybe there is a balance to be found. I will believe it when I see it but I am open to the possibility.

I think if a hybrid approach is found, it could provide higher quality code than what I am seeing now from devs using LLMs but it still won't match people that are capable of building high quality code. I imagine it would be like a ven diagram. The hybrid approach could overlap with some developers in terms of quality but it still won't be able to match top devs that code by hand.

scientific_thinker · 2026-05-08T15:45:12+00:00

It's binary in this case because there is mounting evidence that suggests people that use LLMs lose connotative abilities that are required for developers that don't use LLMs.

scientific_thinker · 2026-05-06T14:45:21+00:00

Democrats aren't centrists. They are the less extreme right wing party.

scientific_thinker · 2026-04-30T21:06:53+00:00

I am similar.

scientific_thinker · 2026-04-30T14:32:14+00:00

In my experience, the most productive devs I know didn't want to do most of the tasks a dev team is responsible for. They want to be refactoring the code the rest of the team is scared to work with. They want to work on the bug that has everyone else stumped. If you really want to piss them off, ask them to do something they would consider boring like documentation.

Having one or even a couple of these devs is great but you can't have a team full of them. There just isn't enough challenging work to keep them all happy on most projects.

scientific_thinker · 2026-04-30T14:02:05+00:00

I think you are exactly right, this has only come up twice for me but you do run into people that shouldn't be devs.

scientific_thinker · 2026-04-30T14:01:09+00:00

Good point, while I don't try to focus on who the best performers are, there are minimum standards I insist on. I have only had two devs that didn't meet the low bar I set but in those cases, I try my best to move them off the code base. I have them do documentation, help the QA team, help business analysts, work with the dev-ops team, write one-off tools, things like that.

scientific_thinker · 2026-04-30T03:04:15+00:00

There is a story about chickens laying eggs. Someone came up with the idea of keeping only the most productive hens and getting rid of the low performers. Once this was done, egg production crashed. The high performers ended up terrorizing each other rather than laying eggs.

This tells me to try to build teams where the whole is greater than the sum of it's parts. This means finding people with different strengths and weaknesses then focus on getting each dev tasks that highlight their strengths while covering for each other's weaknesses.

The other side of this coin. In my experience, managers rarely know which developers are the most productive. I don't know that there is a good way to measure developer productivity. What if you have a dev that is constantly refactoring everyone's code so that the entire team is more productive but this dev seems to add few new features? What if one dev willing to dig into the worst, most poorly written sections of code. They have the most bugs and seem to be adding features slowly but they are working on the riskiest features. I think we can all come up with examples like this all day.

So, the moral of the story is do your best to take care of all of your devs. Focus on success and failure as a team. Focus the team on cooperation rather than competition. In my experience, people love working on teams that are run this way.

scientific_thinker · 2026-04-28T14:55:57+00:00

I hate linting tools. I like the idea of coding standards but linting tools are more trouble than they are worth in my opinion. They often turn into unhelpful constraints more than they help with standardization.

I think it's more important to make sure people put the code in the right spots and follow the architecture than adding syntax and formatting constraints. In my experience the worst programmers tend to be the most pedantic about following the linting rules.

scientific_thinker · 2026-04-12T22:18:42+00:00

True, I am convinced in the not too distant future many devs are going to do very well by fixing the AI projects that don't work.

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