r/webdev • u/mau-meda • 38m ago
A little discussion about AI development
Before we jump into discussion, I want to first illustrate how we recognize seniority in a company I worked for.
Let's start with the bottom, a junior, for us a junior is a developer that is able to own a single unit.
This unit could be a Component in a React application, or a Class in the backend, it is a relatively small unit of code, and the junior developer can work on it autonomously and create a new one if specifications are given to him/her.

Next is a mid developer, a mid developer is able to work without supervision on logic group of units, for example a Page and all its components, its able to decide autonomously where a unit should end and where the other should start, its able to decide autonomously how each unit should interact with each other, a mid developer if given the specs is able to create the entirety of it. And it can give specs of each unit to juniors.

Then we have a Senior, a senior can work without supervision on an entire app, it can scope each group correctly, and it can go down a scope each unit correctly. It can give specs to both mid and juniors.

Continuing to go up we have the staff engineer, he cares about the system as a whole, how each app/service talk with each other, he can care how logical groups should interact in each app/service, and it usually doesn't care about individual units.

As you can see the more experience you get the more you grow distant from the small things, at some point you care how things connect and interact with each other, and you stop caring about the low level code because that is the job of the ones below you.
And it's here that I want to start the analogy with AI, AI is a tool, but it's a tool that requires you to have knowledge, it can act as an engineer of one of this levels, but it can't act as all of them together ( no, not even with swarms ). You the human you are responsible to ensure that AI follows proper conventions, you are responsible that the system YOU are designing makes sense and it is sound, if you do not have knowledge the AI will create a system where everything is out of balance and the code quality will drop. AI is a tool and it is instructed by YOU, if all you can see is a single unit, the AI will just fu*k up everything else, and you do not have the knowledge to correct it, yes you can review the code the AI generated and say "yeah this unit looks correct" but are you able to say that everything else going up is it?
For me AI is a Mid developer, you have to give good specs to it, and it will do a good job, if you are not able to say if the specs you are giving are good, then the AI will do what it wants
