Congratulations on this type of problem 😄

“10 hours straight. He’s a machine.”

Looks great!

I was a tech guy in 90's. There was a feeling amongst the older guys that us new breed were idiots because we were only working on the application layer and didn't understand the 1's and 0's. Many of my dads friends believed you shouldn't be able to drive a car unless you knew how to fix it.

Do you see any reason that prevents AI from being incorporated into the process?

It’s very early days, so makes sense that things diverge before they converge.

In my experience, AI code assistants are already good enough to significantly speed up my development and show me approaches I didn’t think of myself.

We all need to learn how to use it and what it’s good enough at now.

But they’re probably faster? Do code reviews and show them prompts that point out the weakness of their code. They’ll learn faster than the other cohort that way, simply because their iteration cycle is shorter.

Encourage that cohort to leverage AI as a learning tool, rather than a code generator.

After each session, see if you can find coding conventions or other opinionated things you can define as prompt rules. Commit them to git so the entire team will prompt AI similarly.

Working with AI is a skill that devs of any skill level can and should learn.

Start with function signatures and return types, then work through to implementation. Continuously iterate and optionally revert and try again with clearer requirements. When you’ve shown them a couple of times, they’ll understand what to look out for when evaluating the AI responses.

I’d start with working alongside them if you have the time and let them work with ai. Prompt for design options and their tradeoffs. Provide additional non-functional requirements until a decent approach emerges. Then let it summarise and start iterating on implementation.

It sounded like you’d advise juniors against using AI. Secretly going against the advice of a senior can induce shame.

If used correctly (which you can teach junior devs), AI can be a medior pair programmer and private tutor.

Why don’t you teach them how to leverage AI to accelerate their growth?

Imagine telling them that they can’t look at how others tie their laces because they might do it badly/wrongly.

Shame them into painstakingly figuring it out by themselves by trial and error.

How so?