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Discussion on: You’ve got Chat instead of a brain: how AI is messing up junior developers

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Ashley Childress

I can definitely see how this is a huge problem and it's really up to us to stop it. I'm working with my first mentee this summer and I've made a point to showcase the practical use cases of AI.

As an example, the day that we were supposed to pair, but I got pulled into a prod call instead? AI was a perfect solution. A few years ago, the best you would have gotten is "do a search for and learn what you can" and maybe we'll talk about it later. What I did instead: "Open your copilot, put it in Ask mode, and ask it questions about the codebase. When you think you understand it - prompt it to quiz you with simple multiple choice. If you really start feeling like you've got it down - go ahead and flip the Edit on and have it update the readme. Proof it so you know it matches what you learned and then send me a PR".

Did he get it right that round? No, not even by half 😆 Did he learn something along the way? Absolutely, and he's a little better at utilizing those tools the correct way. Bonus that I was quizzed for a solid hour the next day on responsible AI and it's use cases in the engineering world.

These are the sorts of things that schools should be teaching right now. AI isn't going anywhere - and what happens in 5 or 10 years when nobody is teaching these sorts of things? Scary to think about...