Comment by antonymoose
Comment by antonymoose 3 days ago
I’ve had interns be a net negative, I’ve had Juniors be a net negative, I’ve had Seniors be a net negative and even managers!
Turns out some people suck, but most of them don’t suck.
Comment by antonymoose 3 days ago
I’ve had interns be a net negative, I’ve had Juniors be a net negative, I’ve had Seniors be a net negative and even managers!
Turns out some people suck, but most of them don’t suck.
> junior developers with no experience are going to need more handholding
Unlike AI, which gives me fake methods, broken code, and wrong advice with full confidence.
I just “wrote” 2000 lines of code for a project between Node for the AWS CDK and Python using the AWS SDK (Boto3). Between both, ChatGPT needed to “know” the correct API for 12 services, SQL and HTML (for a static report). The only thing it got wrong with a one shot approach was a specific Bedrock message payload for a specific LLM model. That was even just a matter of saying “verify the payload on the web using the official docs”.
Yes it was just as well structured as I - someone who has been coding as a hobby or professionally for four decades - would have done.
That's great for you. I ask Sonnet 4 to make a migration and a form in Laravel Filament, and it regularly shits itself. I'm curious what those 12 services were, they must've had unchanging, well documented APIs.
That’s the advantage of working with AWS services, everything is well documented with plenty of official and unofficial code showing how to do most things.
Even for a service I know is new, I can just tell it to “look up the official documentation”
Using ChatGPT 5 Fast
AWS CDK apps (separate ones) using Node
- EC2 (create an instance)
- Aurora MySQL Serverless v2
- Create a VPC with no internet access - the EC2 instance was used as a jump box using Session Manager
- VPC Endpoints for Aurora control plane, SNS, S3, DDB, Bedrock, SQS, Session Manager
- Lambda including using the Docker lambda builder
- DDB
- it also created the proper narrowly scoped IAM permissions for tfe lambdas (I told it the services the Lambdas cared about)
The various Lambdas in Python using Boto3
- Bedrock including the Converse and Invoke APIs for the Nova and Anthropic families
- knowing how to process SQS Messages coming in as events
- MySQL flavored SQL for Upserts
- DDB reads
In another project the services were similar with the addition of Amazon Transcribe.
The difference is probably that I only do green field POC implementations as a solely developer/cloud architect on a project if I am doing hands on keyboard work.
The other part of my job is leading larger projects where I purposefully don’t commit to pulling stories off the board since I’m always in meetings with customers, project managers, sales or helping other engineers.
I might even then do a separate POC as a research project/enablement. But it won’t be modifying existing code that I didn’t design.
Truly depends on the organization and systems. I’m at a small firm with too few Senior staff, lots of fire-fighting going on among us, etc. We have loads of low-hanging fruit for our Juniors so we tend to have very quick results after an initial onboarding.
But by definition, junior developers with no experience are going to need more handholding and tale time away from experience developers.