About whether juniors relying on LLMs learn more slowly and turn in worse code.
Has this happened?
Yes 90 (70%)Not sure 13 (10%)No 26 (20%)
Votes cast 1–2 October 2026: 100,590 votes from 9,694 people.
Hacker News has set AI a lot of challenges over the years. Which ones has it met?
About whether juniors relying on LLMs learn more slowly and turn in worse code.
Votes cast 1–2 October 2026: 100,590 votes from 9,694 people.
This is exactly what I'm talking about. Ever since LLMs took over, I've noticed an uptick in my fellow senior developers complain about the quality of work, but I've also seen a huge increase in the poor quality of PRs to open source projects.
Like, normally my primary complaint about LLMs is their copyright violating nature, and how it is hanging everyone who has ever published the output of an LLM out to dry, but unless LLM output improves, I think it may end up being a non-issue: their use will die out, and every AI startup will die, just like all the Alt-coin startups did.
Want to change my mind on LLM quality? Have it produce code so good that I can't tell the difference between an inexperienced developer (the kind that would be hired into a junior role, not the kind that would be hired for an internship) and the output of this thing.