The Death of the Junior Developer

This is where we learn the hard way why chat programming is for senior devs. Please keep your hands and limbs inside the carriage during the ride.

GPT's redesign was awful - but not when you looked directly at it. Up close it was downright cozy.

You had to pull back and look at the design in the broader context of its interactions with other subsystems, but also support, maintenance, upgrades, add-ons, and a bunch of other dimensions that are critically important to software design and engineering. With that wider lens, it was an Unbreakable-level train wreck waiting to happen.

But it was wearing a superb disguise. A less experienced dev would surely have fallen for it. I could feel the power and the attraction of the approach it was espousing, the force of the arguments backing it. The whole thing was appealingly packaged, technically correct, and laid out for you to just take it and run! (My pal Chris Smith says the word I'm looking for is "specious". So yeah, that.)

And it just hit me all at once how hilariously inappropriate and potentially dangerous this answer was. It was so impressive and so spooky. I laughed and laughed, like a little kid watching bubble bath plant monsters replacing all the people.

My senior colleagues have recently recounted similar chat scenarios in which a more junior dev would have been completely taken in, potentially losing days to weeks of work going the wrong direction.

Or worse.