AI Tools Are Wrecking Junior Developers! - Principal Software Engineering Manager AMA

all right we're just getting started here just want to double check that the streams are working the bits are flowing let's see Instagram you're on okay I think we're doing it I think it's real life I don't think I forgot anything this time guess we'll find out um cool if you're joining in the chat give me a hello let me know the chat's working I will be monitoring on uh different platforms let me get my chat turned on as well there it is no messages yet um so yeah if you're just joining say hello let me know what's working uh I am watching on Instagram because Instagram chat hey infected FPS good to see you Instagram chat and Tik Tok chat are separate unfortunately um I can stream there but the chat's not connected and then LinkedIn I like to double check because linkedin's important to me but who knows if it's ever actually working right um I can't even join my own event on LinkedIn come on let me in um cool yeah so now I can join there we go um so I'll be watching on LinkedIn for chat Instagram ban nice to see you Mitch Lewis nice to see you as well okay it looks like Facebook's working linkedin's working it's working it's all working uh langa on on Instagram hello watching from Instagram awesome stuff thanks for letting me know folks I appreciate it um so yeah welcome this is an AMA I do these every Monday night it is uh 700 p.m. PST for me here uh just a minute or so after and I we'll be doing uh like trying to answer whatever questions you got I'll try to do that of course it's the usual so put them in the chat as they come up um it doesn't matter to me if they're like off topic from today's subject so if it's related to software engineering in some way I'm happy to chat through that so if it's you know thoughts on Career progression getting into the industry if you want to talkn net and C stuff that's cool too um so just let me know in the chat um but yeah this like I think last week was a little atypical for me and uh usually what I do is I talk about the last newsletter article that I put together uh so I will be doing that this time give me one sec I just want to make sure I can pull up the link to that again I don't expect like newsletters aren't for everyone so this isn't me trying to like get you to subscribe to it um in fact if you're going to subscribe and not read it it's not really it's not valuable so let me get the link to it if you want to check it out uh if you do want to subscribe this will let you know essentially uh what I'll be talking about almost all the time on on this stream slot um the other thing I'll mention is that um the streams that I've been trying to do Tuesday Mornings so those ones are at 700 a.m. I do live coding streams at that time slot the past few weeks except when I was on vacation uh I was trying to migrate my blog to Blazer which is super cool um I had Steven gel joining um he's the author of The open- Source uh Blazer blog engine that I uh intended to use and I basically was demoing like how I'm going to be migrating all my WordPress stuff over to that so that was a fun experience you know it was really good to have his input and stuff so um very thankful for that and then this past week and I kind of just like said screw it I'm going to try to go the rest of the way because I'm so sick of blog being down uh so my site is up again it is on Blazer there's still a couple of Kinks to sort out so for example um I've been noticing that my my signal R connection is dropping seems suspicious um but I think it has to do with caching so got to look look got to look into that and then uh the way that I was migrating blog posts if you watch those live streams I was demonstrating how I was using regular Expressions just just to be you know uh quick and dirty I guess to to look for different things that weren't compatible I've noticed that some of the regular Expressions were a little bit too greedy and what I mean by that if you're not familiar with the concepts is that I can match on patterns but uh there are pieces of text that repeat and it was being too greedy and trying to capture more than it should so there's a couple of blog articles that migrated and it like blew away the whole center of the blog article oops um the good news is that I was taking snapshots of different articles their conversion so um I can rerun the whole migration which is super cool um and not worry about essentially even any downtime so um just a heads up the s's live um and I'll I'll put together some videos that are a little bit more polished like the live streams were fun but I want to talk about like hey if you want to get a Blazer blog set up like here's what to do um I'll probably even show some of the Azure stuff where I'm hosting now and one of the last things on my list is that I need to get um like Google analytics hooked up and there's supposed to be like a couple of lines to add and it all just works but when I do it the whole site just like doesn't work so I got to go back to the drawing board on that one but anyway that's uh Tuesday Mornings I'll probably finish up the migration chat tomorrow morning and then what I'm going to try to do is on those streams demonstrate writing code with AI and we're going to be talking about Ai and Junior software developers in this chat so I thought I was talking with my video editor because the video that I put out um on this which is also kind of out of order for me let me get the the video pulled up and you can check it out if you're interested um grab that link I'll put it into the chat if you're on a different platform like if you're on LinkedIn if you just go to my YouTube channel which is just uh let me type that in as well it's just a at Dev leader so YouTube oh my keyboards the the the USB buffer is all backed up on on my keyboard and from the USB hub so it's like uh trying to queue up all of these key strokes and then they're all getting neglected and then it just blasts away like it's big pain in the butt so at so if you go to it needs an S there one sec sorry I'm falling apart thanks keyboard um that's the YouTube channel if that's not where you came from but if you watch the most recent video that's essentially what I'm going to be talking about today and when I was talking with my editor because this one performed pretty well um I've been going through a bit of a rut so this one performed pretty well and we were talking about like it might be a pretty interesting idea to talk more about AI development and I could demonstrate like let's go build something and I'm just going to use like chat GPT and talk to it and see what we can build so I'll be trying to do that on the Tuesday streams going forward I think it'll be pretty fun um okay and I see a question from infected FPS before I dive into the topic today so got one that's uh probably off topic before you get into your usual stuff got any advice for writing more technical blogs yeah I wanted to finally make uh use of a domain I bought but no clue what to even start with yeah so um it depends how like serious you want to get with this stuff right so if you just want to be casual about it and if you don't have a reason to not be casual I would say just stick to being casual um otherwise if you're trying to be more serious I would say like one of the biggest things is find a way to be consistent and when I say the word consistent I don't mean like every every week at exactly this time you must publish your blog or every day you must publish a Blog at this time like not that kind of consistency but I mean like committing yourself to to publishing blog posts I think that's important if you're trying to be serious about it otherwise what happens is like you'll find that it starts to become work and then if you're not putting some framework in place for consistency it's easy to be like ah like I don't want to do it um I'm busy like you need to prioritize it so that's one thing I would mention based on how serious you want to be is find a way to be consistent uh I'll talk a little bit more about that after uh in terms of like what to write about and that kind of stuff um so I would just recommend like if you have a bunch of stuff that's top of Mind where you're like I think this would be helpful um first of all I would say like one of the things I hear people talk to me about is like I don't want to do it because I feel like other people have already done it there's a million C uh tutorials there's a million articles on whatever and they're not wrong but what there isn't is there's not a million articles written by you so you will be different and that doesn't when I say you'll be different I don't mean you're going to publish an article and it's going to get 10 trillion views and you'll you know become a trillionaire or something like I just mean you will be producing content even if it's on the same topic you will present it in a way that other people have not done and there's power in that and I think a lot of people miss that like when I'm talking to all of you and I'm putting out YouTube videos and articles and stuff I'm not saying things that other people can't say or have not said right like I'm not special that way so um I'm just here sharing stuff right these are my experiences these are my perspectives and opinions um and I would say like you can you can do the same thing um I told if you're a net developer um you'll know who these people are if you're not then I'll elaborate a little further but um so Nick chapsas is one of the biggest uh like C and net creators like on YouTube and uh Milan javanovich is also another one who's a very big creator and before I started making YouTube videos I know the question was about blog articles but before I started making YouTube videos um I remember I started blogging in 2013 and gave up and one of the the catalysts for me getting back into it and saying I'm going to take this seriously was I was watching their videos going like these guys have been successful and this is going to sound like it's like an insult and I don't mean it this way and I've told this to them directly but I was like look what the these guys are doing I think I can do that and that's not to discredit like how good they are at it or their SK skill level their video production anything like that what I meant by that was like they're being consistent I'm sure if I went and watched their first videos they wouldn't be good I'm sure they would tell you that but I said I'm going to be consistent and like yes they've talked about the same topics that I've talked about other people have talked about but they are unique and I am unique so you're going to get a different perspective so uh infected FPS if you want to start getting into blogging I would say number one don't be afraid if other people have talked about the same topics you are unique so you have that going for you if you have a bunch of ideas start with those I would try to space them out like don't try to just write like 50 articles in one week and then feel like crap after when you're like I got nothing to write about if they come to you write them schedule them great and then what I like to do and I haven't done it recently because I've been working on brand ghost so much and I don't have time to write blogs um I do this for YouTube videos that when I'm building stuff and I get stuck I go hm and I search on YouTube and I go interesting like I don't see a good tutorial for this I'm going to write it or in this case I'm going to make a video on it so when I was uh blogging more I would do that where it's like here's a problem I would search online pull resources together and be like I don't want the next person who might be me in the future to have to go do that again let me write a blog article let me make a YouTube video along with it because people you know get value in different ways and then I'll put it all together so yeah my recommendation if you're stuck with like what should I write about is like write about the problems you're solving um another thing that I'll add in before continuing on here so hopefully this is helpful um is like what's a good way to put this you talking about solving the problems or sorry making videos on problems you're solving I lost my train of thought it's going to come back to me though sorry it's gone it's completely out of there guess it's been a long day um but yeah I would I would highly recommend getting into it if you haven't done it before it's uh it's a lot of fun but uh just understand to like you might publish a bunch and like no one will read them and that's okay um I've published some and I'm sure they got very few views and I've gone online later to go search for a tutorial and I'm like thankfully I wrote that because uh now I can help myself so yeah the other idea like the thing I wanted to bring up was around like coming up with ideas but it's gone forever I'm sure like 45 minutes into this conversation it'll come back though but infected FPS I hope that helps um yeah let me know if you start it's a it's a fun journey to be on cool okay folks Let's uh let's talk about today's topic again if you're just joining because I see more people are on put questions in the chat if you want me to answer them I'll I'll pivot to to talk about those but the topic that I want to get into yeah right SL make videos on the problems you're solving that's what I I forgot what was after that though cool so the topic again is going to be about uh junior developers using AI and this uh basically was the content created from a Reddit thread I'm not going to pull up the Reddit thread it's not really worth it um because I can just summarize it for us but essentially there was a developer posting to experienced devs on Reddit and I think this is actually like a pretty common perspective which is interesting right so their the thing that they were bringing to their thread was like Hey folks you know I'm an engineer at someplace a software engineer and there's a junior developer that's joined and they gave an example of trying to pair program with this junior developer and they're saying it's very frustrating because it seems like the junior developer can't code without the AI tools right and this is like some of the limited framing that they provided so they're like seems like they can't code so brand new developer of the team they are junior can't write code unless they're using an llm so you can imagine if you're trying to pair program with this person that anytime they want to go type something they're like uh no like I'm going to the llm for it so it's kind of interesting um a little bit of information I I can't remember if it was added in the original post or a comment later was that they were describing like they actually were part of hiring this person and it was I guess they were I don't want to say they were misled maybe they felt misled but um whatever process they were using for their hiring like did not seem to catch this if if this is actually a problem which is kind of interesting too so um and I'm going to try to get into some more General ideas and it would be really cool if you have thoughts on this in general so Junior developers using AI tools and perhaps becoming over reliant on AI tools if you have thoughts on this as I'm blabbing away here feel free to put that in the chat and then I can like I can bring them up here here and we can discuss them together cuz I think it's a really fascinating thing that's going on here so um I was pretty surprised because I thought that I was going to start scrolling through the comments on this Reddit post and we're going to see a bunch of people just being upset being like yeah I know what you mean like all these Junior devs like they suck they can't code all they do is use chat gbt and I was expecting to just scroll through a sea of these comments and uh I was a little bit surprised because that's not what happened and what a lot of people were saying like there's a handful that were starting off with this saying like well you did say that they're a junior developer and they're new to the company like have you considered that maybe they don't actually know that programming language which is kind of interesting right because um I can think for myself like there are programming languages that I have used before but if you said Nick like cuz I program in C all the time if you said Nick I need you to write this program in Python I would go like literally if you ask me to do it right now I don't know how to declare a variable and I don't know how to declare a function if someone put python code in front of me I could tell you where the variable declaration is and where the function is but I can't recall the exact syntax I don't know so without using an llm if we're talking about doing this 10 years ago I would go to Google and I would would just say you know python how to declare variable oh it's ridiculously simple python how to declare function oh ridiculously simple right like if it was a different programming language I would do I would do the exact same thing for languages that I've used before like I don't program in JavaScript a lot but I would do the same thing like how to declare how how do I make an async function in in JavaScript I don't know like I know what it is but I don't know the syntax and it's not muscle memory for me CU I don't use it all the time and I use C all the time and it's barely muscle memory because as soon as Visual Studio doesn't work and I lose intellisense I feel like I don't have thumbs anymore so like um we become reliant on the tools it's just that the tools are different so I thought it was really interesting that a lot of people were calling out by the way have you considered this person might not know the programming language so that was the first one that I thought uh was kind of interesting so um LinkedIn chat here interesting I assume most of the hiring process for junior Dev involves some coding and data algorithms yeah so this is an interesting point right you would assume that and I would as well and if that was the case then they must have demonstrated somehow in the interview that they had some ability to you know to do algorithms and at least to code things high level but like the language choice right like did they just say hey do it in any language you want um if they genuinely if they expect their developers to program in some specific language I don't think they called out what it was but say we need our developers to program in C++ we need that like if that's a requirement did you interview for it like I I feel like in this case they did not um so and it's it's missing from the original post because what's what's Challen in is like um like do they actually know if that developer knows the programming language or not like there just isn't enough context I think a lot of people were suggesting like it's very likely that this person just does not know the syntax so thought that was one interesting part about this um another interesting part that this person said in their post though was that and this is like way later on in the comments and stuff they were saying that they're on a team currently and that team there's only that person and one other person that uh is like a a coder and everyone else just uses AI tools and stuff so here I am reading this going like why is this person upset about this junior developer using AI tools if the rest of the team is doing that too like seems weird to call them out but anyway uh if I flip the script a little bit um if we think about like the expectations that this team has right like it's not for me to say right or wrong right like I don't know uh and I don't know their process um but and I'm not trying to to claim right or wrong but if their process and how their team works is they expect a lot of PA programming if they do if they expect that everyone knows the language fluently right uh if they expect if they have other requirements around how people are working then like why are they not interviewing for it I think is an interesting thing to ask right so instead of being you can flip the whole thing to say like forget AI forget AI entirely let's pretend it's 10 years ago and we don't have llms to go talk to now the scenario is hey this junior developer joined we're trying to um we're trying to pair program but every time I go to ask them to write a line of code they jump onto Google and they say how to declare a variable in JavaScript how to write a function how to like do you see do you see the difference like it's just the tool right so if these individuals have constraints around what is required I think that they need to be more transparent about that during the interview process or else they're setting themselves up for disappointment this way so I thought that was kind of a interesting thing to look at there's one more thing that's kind of escaping my mind that I'll come back to but um I guess my brain is just like not working today but um I apologize for that so I'm going to jump to uh more parts specifically in the article um so I don't know I'm I'm going to catch up on the chat here so infected FPS um thankfully my company hasn't had much issues with AI Reliance with Junior devs at least on my team personally noticed an aathy towards AI from both Junior and season devs instead of using co-pilot or chat gbt to get examples of implementations or best practice they just wing it and Implement things in an incorrect outdated way yeah so this is like I I'll come back to this cuz I think it's a really good point um and I do want to talk about it so the the thing that I started mentioning in in my article was like well I I want to frame this up a little bit more so I'm genuinely not against people using AI tools and like and heavily relying on them and I'm not heavily against that because sorry I'm not against that heavy heavy usage I'm struggling today I'm not against that heavy usage because like these I don't have enough context on this stuff like this stuff is new like I could imagine if I were trying to become a programmer and I had access to something like this at the time I would probably be trying to spend tons of time with it and using it so I'm looking at this being like it's weird because it's not how I did it but that doesn't make it wrong now there are some things that I think are kind of risky and that's where I'm going to come back to infected FPS as point in the chat but before I get there the the one thing that I think um that I think uh llms do really well especially for juniors is that it lets them Leap Frog ahead in terms of what they're able to build so for example if I were a junior developer again and I were starting out and I said I want to start programming something like if I was like I want to go build a web application that can I don't know like it's a Pokemon database and I can go scrolling through the different Pokemon just making something up everyone loves Pokemon right um so if I wanted to go build that I'm like okay I have to go write it like do a search online like what are different programming languages what are different text Stacks to go use like how do I how do I go start this thing and then I'm like okay well database like or I might not even know what a database is right like how do I how do I store information like um it would be pretty daunting you could do it because that's how we did it right you could go piece this stuff together by doing your searches and trying to bring the information in but now you could literally type to an llm like I would like to make a Pokemon database with a a user interface and a web application and and and I don't know what programming language and text stack to use could you recommend one and start building this part of the application for me and it would probably do it um at least at least better than you could on your own uh if you were just starting out so I feel like it gives you this ridiculous Advantage for like jumping ahead to getting something and this where I want to come back to infected FPS is point which is like that's something it doesn't mean it's right it doesn't mean it's the best it doesn't mean anything it just means that it's something so uh on Instagram where are you from I am currently from Seattle area uh I am from Canada though so if I talk kind of funny and I say sorry a lot that's just because I'm Canadian um so I don't know what that's all a boot though so the idea here is that when you're able to use tools that that can really give you like this ADV Advanced sort of like big step ahead to getting stuff made it's very easy to go cool like it built the thing like it it did it I'm going to take that and I'm going to try running at least I'm going to press play in my IDE okay and it worked I see a result cool okay Mr chat GPT um I want to make sure that I can have something in the user interface to sort the Pokemon and I want to be able to search by their their primary type I'm just making stuff up about Pokemon right like but you could go ask chat GPT to do this and it's maintaining the context and then it starts building more of your app for you and you copy and paste that you try it out quickly and it's working like you end up being able to just take the output and not think much about it so there is a risk here of course and as as infected FPS was saying in the chat right instead of using copil chat GP to get examples of implementations or best practices they just wing it and Implement things in an incorrect outdated way so um if you're just taking stuff out of the llm and not thinking about it and it happens to work and you're not digging into it more like that's where I think it starts to become risky now I will say this and I've I've written it and I will say it this is recorded but I'm very curious to see I'm very curious to see if my nervousness around this is like completely disproven if if llms get so good that people can just get away with like essentially just relying on them to Output stuff and then when it doesn't work they just say hey it didn't work and the llm goes no problem and builds it perfect like I'm curious to see if people can be genuinely like very productive and very effective software Engineers like that I have a hard time believing it personally but that's because my experience has looked nothing like that so uh I am curious about it though so how can we start to improve this right so if you were a junior software developer and you were coming to me saying hey like I am relying on llms a lot um and now I'm getting like you know I've been hearing people kind of make fun of this or challenge it and like I want to make sure that I'm set up for Success like hey Nick what would you recommend well I would say like don't stop using the llm like it's a tool you have a more powerful tool and llm than I ever had because it was just searching on the internet stack Overflow and code project and if it wasn't there then you're you're coming up with it for the first time in the universe at least in a documented way right so um you have you have these Powerhouse tools at your fingertips I would say like Leverage them but um the thing personally that I feel like gets missed in these scenarios is that you're using these tools to produce and when I talk uh historically when I talk about building software to like get better at building software one of the things that you need to EXP experience in my opinion to to learn effectively is like you need to get stuck and you need to fail at things like you need to be in that state where you're like this isn't working I don't know what to do try things out and then you find something that works and that enables you to go to the next step and I'm not sure if people are getting enough of that when they're using llms and like even from my own experience I use uh chat GPT a lot for writing SQL queries now and sometimes the query will get and I I know how to write SQL queries is just a convenience thing for me so sometimes you know it's writing a query for me and I'm like man that's a that's a pretty gnarly query and then I go run it and I'm like okay it's working awesome and then I find like a a a bug or like something I need changed in it and it's like no fault of the llm I never clarified that requirement and then I ask it to like make an improvement or do a change and now there's still a bug in it and then I get into this habit of like hey chat gbt still a bug tries again hey chat gbt there's still a bug but what's happening is I'm not actually learning like I'm not trying to figure out the problem I'm strictly using a tool for it if you watched my live stream that I did last week in the morning for programming uh when I was converting pieces of my my WordPress blog I was doing this I was writing regular expressions and they were regular expressions are the worst and they're absolutely gnarly and chat GPT does a pretty good job of writing regular Expressions but you need to give it context if you're not telling it enough about the scenario you're trying to work with like it doesn't know right like so it's going to give you something and what was happening for me was I was talking to chat GPT about this it would give me the regular expression I'd run it wasn't matching and I'm looking at this Rex like I can't I can't edit this thing it's too nasty so hey chaty PT still doesn't work and you just get into this pattern of not actually learning so the recommendation I would have to to Junior devs that are kind of maybe building a little bit what I would call too much of a Reliance is like number one take the opportunity to ask chat GPT or whatever tool you're using to explain things to you I found chat jpt will give you some type of like here's why at the end but like ask it more questions like why did you go do that why this way if you know of other ways ask it why not that other way um this is where like I'm not good at prompting like I'm not good at getting effective answers out of it but I could think about the topics that I would want to ask like hey thanks this query worked but like is it performant like could we make it faster like and you know what are we optimizing for with this query um I've had code that I've had chat GPT output and it did like multiple SQL queries and I said hey like I want to do one round trip with this I don't want to make three separate uh queries uh to go to the server like could we do this in one so there's things that I know to ask it and that only comes with experience right so um so infected FPS say after a few itations the memory of the AI starts working against it yeah so you start getting into this Loop of there's a bug can you fix it yeah exactly um and then it sometimes it fixes the bug and then it creates another one like it undoes what it fixed earlier and you're like like why can't I just program for myself so it's uh it's you have to understand the tools and this is another thing just to kind of jump back a little bit I'm very curious if the people that like like grew up programming on llms are so good at prompting that they know how to dodge this kind of stuff like I am certainly not good at prompting I'm simply not I need to do more of it I need to understand it more that's certainly like something I don't do well but for someone else who is really good at talking to an llm like maybe they're not a great software developer without it but they know how to prompt effectively I think that that could be a really interesting like advantage in terms of like becoming a better and better software developer so I am very curious about that so advice to Juniors I would say like I know I'm bouncing around a lot but um ask it questions right ask to clarify things um if you're if you have time like I know if you're at work maybe uh some situations or like I don't have all day to keep asking this thing like questions and stuff but ask it for very ask it to explain like why this way versus another like take the time to go learn from it instead of just copy pasting the output so that's one thing um I think something else I would recommend is like is practice debugging with it because that's very helpful so when it's not working back to this like there's a bug can you fix it like go through the steps yourself like when it's not working and you're like I don't even know what Chad gbd told me to write here like I I don't understand any of it like go run the code and step through it like this is I think one of the best ways to learn is if you're not the one actually just like outputting the information like the the the code like debug it step through it debug it understand what it's actually doing um because that's going to be another skill that when you're working with chat GPT or even without it like the the debugging skills are huge and probably very undervalued until you're building a lot of software and you're realizing I spend a lot of time debugging stuff right um so you can use llms for that purpose um what else uh I would say not just um not just to question it oh one sec so one thing I'm not sure can really be gained with heavy Reliance on AI is knowing what you don't know to be able to ask yeah yeah yeah so yeah let me let me jump to this I think this is a good point so this is the where I wonder what kind of a a vicious cycle we create right so for example um I've been writing software for a long time now and I'm not perfect like no one is and if I had to go debug something with chat GPT or I had to ask it to build something like I have lived experiences where I could go question it I could challenge it I could if it's not working I could um I could give it hints like hey like I saw you output this code like this is clearly not going to work and I can identify that stuff um if I was building an app and I was asking chat GPT to build part of it I could say like hm okay I know this thing is going to put together some sort of slop for me to use but hey like I need to uh optimize for uh low latency I need to minimize a number of round trips here I need to like whatever it happens to be I can add that extra detail in so the experiences that we have we can feed back in to the prompt right so I think if you if you've been if you've been using llms for a little bit you know this already that the more context that you can add that's tailored for what you're doing the more specific context you can add the better the results going to be so again if you're a junior and no fault of yours if you don't have a ton of experience yet you're probably not going to know a bunch of different things that you should be adding for context and like how do you just get that so I think it requires like a bunch of lived experiences if there are ways to shortcut that super cool I love to see more of that happening because like I said I'm genuinely interested in seeing how this progresses it's not not how I approach software development so um would be really interested to see but I guess that's like probably the the next like third piece of advice right so is really to kind of use it as an effective feedback loop so as you are learning things as a junior right you're seeing things that are working you're seeing like hey if I prompt J GPT and it makes something for me I've seen this pattern where like it's sometimes neglecting um you know it's not writing code that's testable by our standards where we work it's just not doing that so I find it's writing stuff and then I have to rewrite it and like I'm wasting time like okay well what could you do differently right like you're probably better at prompting than I am but context right what's the context hey chat GPT um I notic or I don't even know how you talk to it it depends on your relationship with the the chat GPT but you might say like uh we want to Avo I'm just making this up by the way like we want to avoid static references uh to methods because uh that way I I'll be able to mock out this the third party service that I want to be able to test with right you're going this needs to be testable this is a thing that comes up it's really important we need testability based on how we test we want to mock out third party Services if you're latching on to that saying that's not how you test you're missing the point it's okay um but you want to give it the context right if you're uh writing uh performance critical code and you're prompting chat GPT and it's spitting out stuff that seems to work and you're like yeah but it's like 15 levels of nested for Loops like that can't possibly be efficient like tell it that hey chat GPT this is performance critical code we want to reduce memory allocations we want to like you know blah blah blah and I need you to build this like giving it that context but that's going to take you repeating things messing up and learning so uh I I guess like it's probably implicit I should have said this one is number three but like don't just blindly take the code like it's not enough to go copy paste the code uh maybe not even run it once before you keep going like hey look it looks like it's going to compile there's no errors not good enough um like Try It Out Try breaking it try writing the tests if they're not there like try to do some of the work with it so that you understand what it's giving you I think it's critical and uh we kind of already said it in chat right but it's too easy it's too easy to not do that because it's so easy now for us to just go to the next step he go build the next feature copy paste but uh for those of us that have been around uh before llms like we would do the same thing with like stack Overflow right like this person says it's the answer copy paste that thing let's go rock and roll and then you go run it and you're like ah it doesn't really work and then okay well what was the next most upvoted answer like let me go try that and like copy paste and you're like yeah it's going to work and but you're not like you're barely testing it it's like just enough to like get you past the next level we've all done this kind of stuff before without AI it's just that it's way easier it's just that it's way easier to go type a chat message in and get a response from a robot on on the next step to go take and it sounds confident too right so it's way more uh appealing just to go say well I mean this llm told me so like and it it rationalized it at the end like so I better go use it um versus you like scouring stack Overflow and different random articles being like man I don't even know what I'm doing but someone says this works I'm just going to try it like we want to feels like chat GPT is a more trustable uh Source just because it's uh very confident in its output so um I don't think that it's wrong to use these things heavily but I I guess I don't know if like fear is like too strong of a word I'm nervous I have anxiety around it that that having such a Reliance without questioning things without trying to learn um I think that's where I see like potential challenges like in especially long term because I I don't have like a I don't have a crystal ball I know that might be shocking to some people but no cryst crystal ball here and um if you were to take two developers side by side let's pretend they're equal in every way possible and one of them just like literally only uses an llm to go build software and the other one's like I'm going to I'm going to go use the the stack Overflow uh do it the old school way um I'd be curious to know like like what I might expect happens and total speculation here right it's obviously a very contrived hypothetical situation but with me um does the does the developer who's using the llm like basically get way further ahead sooner because they can just have like entire bits of code that are put together with low effort so they have something working way sooner they can seemly make seemingly make more seibly Seema I said Seema I can't believe that they can seemingly make more progress on their develop effort because they can get more done on the surface but if we look at the other developer do they have a slower start but like their Foundation is being built up more maybe it's slower to get started but like they end up like over time they become more and more effective until the point where they're like okay like yeah you can have an llm spit out code maybe faster than I can type it but like but you're spending so much time messing around with that and I'm able to like exceed you like I don't know if that's going to happen I like that's my assumption but I have literally no evidence it's just like a gut feel and I'm actually hopeful that's not how it works I'm actually hopeful that the person who is using the llm as a tool like maybe they have this period of learning that's kind of in the Middle where they're like man like I'm I'm having a rough time because I keep getting caught on this stuff but but like hm I am really good at prompting I keep running into these issues I wonder if I can like supercharge my learning by leveraging the llm like that's what I'm hopeful for and I would love to see it um like I have no uh it doesn't matter which way it goes to me like it's not it's it's too late for me I guess um but I I'm really curious to see if we have this like new generation of software developers that is is heavily reliant on llms and that actually works in their favor long term um question in chat from YouTube I've worked on WPF zaml C for eight years what should I be focusing on next great question um the only way to answer that is like what do you want to be doing um I don't have enough context to answer this from like a career perspective so the more that you want to add the better um to give you an example though like literally so you said worked on WPF Zam C for 8 years that's literally what I did before Microsoft literally for eight years worked in Wind forms over to WPF and zaml all in C for eight years shipping desktop applications so exact same boat as you uh regard to technology so I think you need to ask yourself what do you want to be doing next because that's hard for me to say um like are you planning to switch jobs if so where do you want to go are you planning just move teams is just for self-learning um like yeah there's a million different things I could say and it's probably not helpful without knowing more context so uh Ary on YouTube If you uh if you want to add more context the more context you add I feel like the more effectively I can try to answer for you so not trying to not trying to be an ass and like give you a crappy answer I would I would like to give you a better answer but I I do need more details to do that effectively um okay let me scroll through because I think that's probably most of oh I I wanted to talk about how I'm using AI tools and I've kind of already done this I kind of already hinted a little bit but uh definitely using AI tools for uh SQL queries so um one thing that like from my experience what I'm finding works really well is like I know how to write SQL queries um I am certainly not like an expert in SQL um like I wouldn't I wouldn't switch jobs and try to take a role that was like squl is the only thing I'm doing that wouldn't feel good can I write SQL queries yes can I read them yes uh when they start to get overly complicated my brain starts to melt and that's just how it is so um but I find if I'm using chat GPT uh for for help on these things then it gets me most of the way and I'm unable to keep up with it once the queries become overly complicated because I don't know what to prompt it with next so we talked about this already in the chat right like this hey it's broken can you fix it like I can't give it more detail I can say like here's the output it's not what I'm expecting like go fix it but even then if I can't hint like hey I notice like you're doing an order Byer you're you're in this join you're missing another ID like if I can't give it that then I'm suddenly I'm not adding value into this feedback loop so um I've been using it a lot for squl but it starts to fall down when the queries get really complicated otherwise though I've done things like I already mentioned that reducing the number of round trips so literally had this situation it was kind of funny um so I'll talk about brand ghost for uh for a moment at least so brand ghost is this uh this platform I'm building for all my content creation uh and for for other people that Ed to uh but so if you see the content I I put out online uh basically if you see it posted on social media I can almost guarantee that I use brand ghost to post it um I very rarely post unless it's a comment I very rarely post on social media so uh in brand ghost there's a lot of SQL um there's data in a SQL database and I was working on this feature for a calendar view and I was working with one of the engineers he works on the front end stuff and I recall uh that we were going to have this funny issue because we didn't have like a bulk API so hey like we want to go populate the calendar but like I don't have a bulk API if you want one thing I can give you one thing if you want a bunch right now that's going to be a bunch of queries and we said you know what like it's not a big deal like low load right now like we'll we'll revisit this to optimize it not a big deal it's all good spoiler alert it was big deal so um we had uh basically we were firing like on every page load we were firing like 15 requests uh to the server so front end to the back end 15 requests and then what I didn't realize is that there was like basically five SQL queries per request that were running so it was more like 45 SQL queries like in an instant so uh and there's no caching or anything so it was just like like it got so wild that and there's another thing layered into here that we have uh automatic scaling that's from Azure it resets every time when we build because a Spire resets it it's a whole other conversation I can't comprehend why that's a default thing but anyway if we have 10 concurrent web requests the automatic scaling new instance comes up so here's what's happening we get a bunch of instances spinning up those instances are designed to be monolithic they will work now at least in parallel with each other but there's no benefit there's zero benefit when there's multiple running at the same time except for like redundancy if one of them stops working but not a good reason so what was happening with this Calendar refresh was multiple instances were spinning up because we were hitting this limit on the number of concurrent HTTP requests those instances go run scheduling logic or like do queries so they're running stuff in the background now and then we layer on the fact that it's doing 45 SQL queries at once and let me tell you when I was looking in Azure uh and looking at the database graph uh because we were there's a couple of us like testing it late at night going like why is the server so slow like are you noticing this like is the like is something broken and we're looking at these queries and it was like oh my God like something's wrong and um when I went looking at it I was like oh like duh I'm doing so many of these queries individually but then I was reading it and I'm like I know why this happened the way that the data structured I don't have like um I don't know a good way to explain I have like a good way to like flatten the data into a data structure so I said okay like I have three working queries here hey chat GPT like here's C code it's a mySQL database I'm using Dapper I like using Dapper over Entity framework core um so that's what I got going on I said here's the C code with the three queries I said I want you to make this one query and I want you to do one round trip to get this data because I need to minimize round trips for performance and then it did it and it showed me something in Dapper that i' never even considered before and I was like oh like damn I actually have a new pattern that I can use here because I know in the code there's a handful of other spots where I'm doing crappy stuff like that too so anyway it was a really cool opportunity for me to learn so uh I definitely use chat GPT for SQL uh regular Expressions is another one again I I can write regular expressions from hand I have the power um but no one likes doing it uh chat GPT is very good at doing it I found if you give it examples um you can say here's something to match on uh here's what I expect write it and then if you have other examples you can say by the way like you also need to support this and it will generally do a pretty good job um I would say more often than not when I'm finding chat GPT is messing up my regular Expressions it's because I'm doing something different than what it's saying like it's using the single line matching and I'm forgetting to put that in like dumb stuff like that so it's actually uh quite good which is uh which is great but I have the benefit that I understand again not like expert level redx Master here but I understand how regular Expressions work um for example building out my blog migrator to go from word press a Blazer I'm was writing regular Expressions I knew it was going to happen and I hadn't had an example yet but I knew there was going to be a situation where it was greedily matching so when I ran into the issue all that I said to chat GPT was here's the query here's some data and it's uh greedily matching on this make it not do that no problem does it perfectly so I've been using it for things pardon me been using it for things that I already have experience doing and I think for me that's a good fit now there's probably a bunch of learning that I could be doing where I lean into chat GPT more so for example and I'm going to be trying this on stream by the way not tonight but I will be doing it where I'm going to take something like so my blog is now in Blazer Blazer does support JavaScript in there as well I suck at anything that's like front end at all and I think it's going to be a really cool opportunity to say like hey Chad gbt I got this thing help me make it better and see what it does um so that will be me trying out like if I were a complete Noob at this how would I do it I do have the advantage that I've been building software for a long time so there's probably other things I'll think to ask but um yeah that's a that's a way that I'm considering at least but for for me it's been primarily if I know how to do it and I don't want to spend time doing it chat GPT hey chat jpt I have this function I want you to remove all the link methods and I want you to build up collections in an optimal way uh because it's a fix size set of data we know what's going on go do it or the opposite hey chat GPT I don't want to have materialized collections I would love if you can change this method to not build up the collection but I want to stream it back with uh with iterators do it I know how to do that I don't want to spend the time doing it though so it can be really nice to have uh the llm do it and then it's something because I understand it I can spot check it and go yeah that's right and sometimes there's little things I'm like oh I didn't think about that or other things where I'm like that's a bug and I got to fix it but I think you get the idea so Ary is on um on Twitch now so uh I look at I look at Job portals and all I see is asp.net now I'm trying to learn asp.net I'm confused which part of asp.net I should focus on uh and should I also learn HTML CSS and JavaScript so depends um thanks for sending that on Twitch I appreciate it um I don't know if um if there's just like crappy experience for people on YouTube I see a couple other messages coming through so maybe it's just um it's a bug it's now a feature uh there you go yeah so I don't know if there's uh other challenges at YouTube so I apologize for your experience there but um yeah I would say like a lot of the world is doing like web Tech um there are a lot of front-end uh opportunities I guess this is why you'll also see a lot of people getting into front end so HTML CSS JavaScript I'll put it this way uh I'm not saying this is good advice by the way I'm just going to tell you because it's true I barely know JavaScript HTML and CSS barely like can I read HTML yes do i under like do I know what a div is yes if I had to look at JavaScript could I read it yes I don't like reading it but I could read it um and CSS is like I'm I couldn't I couldn't do anything in CSS right now if you ask me to not a single thing but if you put CSS in front of me could maybe figure out what it's doing like yeah probably so I'm telling you that not because I'm advising that you also just don't learn it and don't do anything I'm telling you that because there's going to be all sorts of things in your career that like you can't focus on everything and for me I've been able to get to where I am today and I've never focused on those things like almost ever uh I I've spent more time in digital forensics parsing I shouldn't use parsing people don't like that uh sort of recovering uh fragments of HTML so in from like a forensic perspective there's HTML fragments in Ram that's on your in your page file and we're able to go step through that oh man my my Tik Tok disconnected give me one sec we're going live again I don't know why Tik tok's so dumb for this they keep saying like they're like oh you're inactive but I think it's because they're looking for a camera but I'm using like uh OBS like over top of it so it thinks that I'm not here um so anyway like I've spent more time like recovering deleted HTML than I have like writing HTML so um I've also spent like basically Zero part of my career or even in my hobby experience very very little doing front-end work so I am hoping that with my blog being migrated over to blazer from WordPress um that I will be able to you know have more time to go work on that stuff so I have to catch up there yes but there's going to be a lot of ASP onet core um I to give you an example when I ask my audience on YouTube and other platforms that are net developers and I say what do you build what do you what do you want me to focus on overwhelmingly asp.net core overwhelmingly so I think there's a lot of focus there for people um I know you're saying I confused which part of asp.net I should focus on um I don't know if there's a part specifically like I would say just go build some stuff right um like I I know it sounds like I was joking if you were on the stream earlier I was talking about building like a Pokemon database like go build something like it doesn't um I think people get caught up on like they got to build something that's like important but like you don't go build literally anything and and try it out get stuck right connect to a database add offin see how uh how rate limiting works like check out middle Weare like basically just try building stuff and adding features into it um you're gonna you're going to have a a working web API and you need to version it like what are you going to do um you want to keep your server up and not break compatibility so you add a new route like can you change your payload so that it like you can fit more things onto it like whole bunch of different stuff that you can go look at um but front end like I I'm using Blazer now um not for for um for brand ghost we have a a nextjs front end like we're not even using dotnet for the front end um and that's because the other developers working on brand ghost are more they are more familiar with uh like JavaScript typescript for the front end stuff and they can work fast in it there's tons support uh are they net developers yes but from a front-end perspective they're just more familiar with that I am so far away from like being effective in the front end with those things that I can take something like Blazer knowing that it's in C and I and it has like a I know that it's like HTML obviously but there's some of the structure reminds me of zaml where I can literally add in components and stuff and like that's enough familiarity with that kind of tooling for me that even though it might not be the best supported or whatever you want to argue against it I can be like wildly more uh productive than otherwise just because like it's a language I'm familiar with I've spent you know over a decade working with it it just works for me um yeah so yeah I'm planning to rebuild my current company's website and apis from scratch and ASP yeah there you go right um there's gonna like you're going to learn a lot along the way so um the if you found if you found when you were building uh stuff in WPF and zaml and you found like most of your time was spent primarily just like I don't know like positioning stuff in or like in the UI and like making sure things like scale and size properly like that's going to align obviously a lot more with like front end development and sorry I'm not not saying that to like minimize it I just mean like literally you're spending time even though it's like a desktop app like that's the front end that you're seeing uh if you were spending more time like in like the back end of your application like accessing data like uh Reading Writing files connecting to other services like this is probably going to feel more like backend development for asp.net core um it's just that the the framework that you're building on is different one is going to be like a a UI render Loop that's mostly hidden from you in in WPF right but that's what it is it's just a UI render Loop and you get zaml and with asp.net core you have a web server that's going to have middleware and things like that so everything else is still going to be C though so if you're comfortable with C it's just going to be learning these other Concepts so I think you'll be fine um you know I to give you context I have not been working in asp net core for for many many years when I say like I spent my time at that forensics company for eight years building desktop applications like that's literally it it used to be a joke like it used to be a joke that like wasn't actually funny because it was true but I would avoid anything in the front end I don't like frontend Tech I just don't enjoy it so I would actively avoid it now in hindsight that was pretty dumb of me to do I think it seemed kind of funny but like in hindsight who is that hurting just me right so yeah uh I had to I had to switch to asp.net core because I wanted to start building stuff um outside of work uh what did I build I was building something with a buddy I don't know if this is my first asp.net core app I was making it's going to sound funny I think this is the first one that I made but maybe not it was something called hangry and you can totally steal this idea because uh we stopped cuz we saw other people building it I've never heard about it again but it was basically Tinder but for restaurants if that makes sense so to explain you would go on this app if you and your friend or like you and your partner were like we want to eat somewhere but we don't know what to eat because this happens all the time um the idea was that you would both swipe through a set of restaurants and then whatever matched so you both have to pick a restaurant and it's nice because you could do it on your own you don't show the other person you're swiping through the things that you would be willing to eat and then they do it too and then it gives you a match and says great you're getting uh you're getting tacos tonight from this place I thought it was pretty cool um so we built this thing and that was my first sort of I think it was my first example in asp.net core that was something that I like had running in the cloud and stuff so I could do it you can do it for sure um as a c developer learning new tech with C is not that difficult exactly exactly so um I think you'll be fine uh but like I said in terms of what areas to focus on um I don't know if I can necessarily say but if you have something like a goal of rebuilding the company's apis and stuff like get asp.net course set up get it running and start like start with one part of the API guy um surface area get that working play around with it understand how o Works rate limiting blah blah blah um try not to go do all of it at once and then go oh crap like now I have to go figure out how all these things are going to work across all the the routes that we have to build like try to build it out um in pieces and I think you'll do great so hopefully that's helpful ly um yeah I think on the on the llm stuff I think I was basically done by the way so just to heads up so uh just to check my final thoughts from the article uh I was saying like um I think you know using AI tools if you're a junior developer is totally fine by me personally um I'm not against that I think that it's a tool I think like any tool if it's helping you like use it if it's not like understand why it's not because then it's not really something you should be using but um I do think that it's important uh it's not specific to llms I think it's for anything if you're getting answers to things like I think you want to take the time to question what you're getting you want to challenge what you're getting and understand it because if you're not doing those things it's the same this is how I see it it's the same as me going to build something and saying I don't know how to build this turning to a buddy and going hey Johnny can you like can you build this for me and Johnny's like obviously I can build that Nick Johnny builds it for me I go thanks Johnny and then I go okay what's the next thing I have to build um we want to do something else with the Pokemon in our application okay and I go hm yeah I don't know how to do that hey Johnny can you build this thing for the Pokemon in our app and Johnny's like obviously Nick I can build that I can build anything so you end up just like Outsourcing any effort then you never learn so the whole point is like if Johnny were like hey I can go build that for you maybe I would say hey Johnny instead could you walk me through what you plan to build and I will go build it or even if Johnny did build it for you you could say Johnny thanks so much can you tell me why you did it this way can you tell me how this works like go learn from the person it's a huge opportunity that you'd be missing if you weren't doing it so that's what I would recommend to Juniors um and I guess really anyone who's trying to dabble with llms but um I think that's it folks um this will be just a last chance if you have uh questions and stuff before I sign off I like giving people the opportunity to jump in otherwise I do this thing where I have to advertise a little bit so I apologize but uh I hope you're okay with that um been noticing I post places all over the Internet and there's some people that are like very mad at me when something has a cost they're like how dare you how how dare you charge money for something and I'm like look man like do you know how much time I spend like putting out free content like give me a break um so anyway on that note um I do have courses on dome train so uh Ryan Murphy and I have just launched our second course this hasn't really been publicized so sh it's a secret but um it's on dome train and if you notice at the top I'll zoom in can I get this out of the way oh let's get that out of the way okay so 40% off it's not it's not a lie it's real stuff it's 40% off um so Nick chapis runs Dome train he is doing a Black Friday sale so 40% off any course doesn't mean just my courses there's tons of other courses on the site um but uh the chuses that I have Ryan Murphy and I just released this one getting promoted as a software engineer uh so Ryan Murphy and I are tackling the career section of Dome train so we have more courses coming in this space so hopefully uh you know if you're not a net developer and you're like hey Nick like I like your content and uh I find like I can learn from you if you're like but I don't not a c programmer and I have no interest like maybe this stuff is valuable for you for career development uh the last programming course I released was reflection in.net that was a lot of fun to make because I really like building stuff with plugins and I use reflection all the time for it and then uh the last one I'll mention uh is nailing the behavioral interview this is the first one that Ryan Murphy and I put out so uh it's taking the perspective primarily of big Tech behavioral interviews but of course these can apply to uh other jobs as well so um lots of options available the Black Friday sale though is on right now so uh like I said it's 40% off um it's sweet if I just jump over to the choruses page so you can see like like there's lots there's git Blazer right Blazer awesome microservices uh amakai did a bunch of design patterns so these are all way smaller chuses but they'll show you how to use different design patterns facade is my personal favorite um so lots and lots of design patterns which is sweet he's got like this whole page is just his courses uh but there's other stuff on here as well so definitely check that out um what else what else I got going on um YouTube channels so uh I have my own well I should probably show Dev leader because I I don't think that everyone comes from my YouTube channel so if you're not subscribed already um this is the channel right I was I linked it earlier it says I'm live right now but um yeah this is where I put my more polished videos so these will be tutorials there'll be there'll be conversations like this but edited heavily so it's not me just like scrambling for my words and stuff so if you want more polished content the dev leader YouTube channel is where I put my uh content like that so primarily net development but otherwise I do have some content like this um code commute I've been trying to share this one a little bit more had a lot of really good feedack back on this actually so code commute is the uh the Youtube channel that I have I'll put that in the chat as well this one is literally a vlog and as you can see it's me driving in a car um which doesn't sound that exciting I realize uh but I'll make it more exciting because I talk about software engineering in the car and I realize now that I say that out loud neither of those things sound very exciting but I'm getting a lot of good feedback some of these videos have more views on my primary Channel and there's only like 260 subscribers so um personally what I like about code commute is number one uh I do go to the office a couple of times per week um and it keeps me keeps my brain not from melting sitting in traffic I like to talk about things so it's a nice outlet for me so number one I like that number two is I do get questions and comments from people where they want me to talk about different topics I had someone write me like a 2,000-word email not making that up to talk through like a scenario and I talked about it on code commute so um that's this one here uh managing a Mis leveled software engineer was me talking through their scenario and going through it so um what I would say is if you like the approach of the live stream and just want me to stream of Consciousness go through stuff code commute is a channel I would recommend um it's not live so like I'm not Tak I'm not like reading my phone and looking at your messages and stuff I'm literally driving a car but um it's a it's a lot of fun to put those ones together too um otherwise I think that's it unless flashbang warning sorry uh unless you're a content creator uh then I have brand ghost which is the platform that I'm building so I'll just put a link to that as well um brand ghost is where I put a lot of my spare time uh into building this platform so like I said at the beginning of the stream if you're reading my social media posts on different platforms I can basically guarantee that it's posted through brand ghost so um we are launching a free tier that allows you to cross poost across every platform uh which uh is exciting for us to be able to have that uh ability to just share with people for free the primary focus that we offer though um at least right this moment is around something called topic streams so that way if you're a content creator and you have valuable content that's worth reposting so for example I share links out to my blogs my podcast um I I don't even do it for my full length YouTube videos yet and I should um I can repost this stuff and after a few months of posting it it will start recycling if I haven't added more content so that's the power of brand ghost and we're building in layering in all the AI and analytics onto it so if you're a content creator or if you have a small business and you're like man it's really hard to keep up with creating content you can basically make a smaller set of content and leverage the fact that you can buy yourself some time with repeating content so just a shout out to that as well but folks I think that's it I don't see any more um questions coming into the chat so thank you so much for your time if you are watching this right now then this will make sense but if you want to tune in tomorrow morning for the live stream where I'm doing live coding I'll be here at 700 a.m. Pacific um so I will see you then if you're interest in attending and thanks so much for being here infected FPS good to see you as always you're on a streak for sure I don't know what the streak is but it's it's a good streak