[apical_dendrite]

This happened to me yesterday. I give a junior engineer a project. He turns it around really quickly with Cursor. I review the code, get him to fix some things (again turned around really quickly with Cursor) and he merges it. I then try a couple test cases and the system does the wrong thing on the second one I try. I ask him to fix it. He puts into cursor a prompt like "fix this for xyz case" and submits a PR. But when I look at the PR, it's clearly wrong. The model completely misunderstood the code. So I leave a detailed comment explaining exactly what the code does.

He's moving so fast that he's not bothering to learn how the system actually works. He just implicitly trusts what the model tells him. I'm trying to get him to do end-to-end manual testing using the system itself (log into the web app in a local or staging environment and go through the actions that the user would go through), he just has the AI generate tests and trusts the output. So he completely misses things that would be clear if you learned the system at a deep level and could see how the individual project you're working on fit in with the larger system

I see this with all the junior engineers on my team. They've never learned how to use a debugger and don't care to learn. They just ask the model. Sometimes they think critically about the system and the best way to do something, but not always. They often aren't looking that critically at the model's output.

[1123581321]

Senior engineers must become more comfortable giving quick, broad feedback that matches the minimal time put into the PR. "This doesn't fit how the system works; please research and write a more detailed prompt and redo this" is the advice they need. It feels taboo to do it to a significant diff, but diff size no longer has much correlation to thought or effort in these situations.