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I will appreciate more a junior dev that is trying to write code from his head, even that he fails, than one that just jump into a prompt to finish his slop.
Failure is a human feature and that's how we learn better, from failures, not from making things faster.
Regardless of feelings the dev that is coding from his head is trying to learn and will benefit from it. AI tools can be used to accelerate learning but the temptation is to lean on them and cheat yourself out of learning.
20 years ago we didn't have all these learning tools or AI. Open source code I read helped me learn. Reading programming books. And just writing code to see if it would work. The tools have changed. Its much easier to learn now if you want to. Many are just lazy. They will pay for it in the long run.
Many are just lazy. They will pay for it in the long run.
This I understand. What I do not understand is why we still call these guys "devs".
Well... I have never met one... these people you speak of.
For all I know they could be devs. Actually know what they are doing but just are lazy. They could be script kiddies which is a good comparison. Most devs I know do not care about labels. Only the work you do.
The world is full of crappy devs. The majority probably aren't good. Its a pretty good chance that the creators of slop aren't devs. Calling them devs really doesn't change anything though. Neither does NOT calling them devs.
This online world is fake anyway. If I ever meet one of these prompters in person I will let you know. I have met people that use LLMs to write code that are not devs. They don't call themselves devs. They know they aren't. They used to just copy code from Stackoverflow.
When I was just starting in software dev I didn't want to call myself a dev. So I didn't. Then an old timer corrected me. You write code for a living you are a dev. You may suck but you are learning. It doesn't really matter what you call yourself but understand where you are and where you are going.
He was wrong about one thing. It does matter in this sense. Titles and labels can mean more or less money. Vibe coders may be able to fool fools but I don't really care about that.
I think its about more than that. Its about a mischaracterization of the use of AI being a boolean.
There have always been fakers. Now its just easier. People that copy and paste. AI does this much better. The results are what matter and you don't get good results from a prompter that isn't actually a dev. These tools are REALLY dumb. But good at guessing and the more clear instructions and guardrails you give it the better the results.
So, these prompters that create slop could be devs or not. But if we say they aren't devs that fixes what? There are terrible devs out there. There are terrible PMs. Results are the metric.