{"id":222,"date":"2023-11-27T06:30:26","date_gmt":"2023-11-27T06:30:26","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/redmonk.com\/kholterhoff\/?p=222"},"modified":"2024-02-22T15:58:05","modified_gmt":"2024-02-22T15:58:05","slug":"can-ai-code-assistants-really-teach-junior-developers-to-code","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/redmonk.com\/kholterhoff\/2023\/11\/27\/can-ai-code-assistants-really-teach-junior-developers-to-code\/","title":{"rendered":"Can AI Code Assistants Really Teach Junior Developers to Code? Ask a Redditor"},"content":{"rendered":"

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Anyone paying attention to the marketing language around AI code assistants will recognize the push to position these tools as not merely developer-led (in the vein of \u201cTrust, but Verify<\/a>\u201d), but also as experts able to lead developers. Take, for example, GitHub Copilot. Earlier this month during the opening keynote for GitHub Universe Colin Merkel<\/a>, a Software Engineer at GitHub, explained that:<\/p>\n

with Copilot, you now have an expert available anytime to answer questions about your code base right from your browser or IDE.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Of course, as I have already written<\/a>, mid and senior level developers don\u2019t accept this line of argument at all. Most tend to view these tools as occupying the subservient role of \u201can endlessly enthusiastic savant intern<\/a>.\u201d I have yet to encounter a single experienced practitioner that thinks AI code assistants don’t require their oversight and direction. Nonetheless, vendors have been eager to suggest that their AI code assistants are increasingly able to stand in as authorities.<\/p>\n

It makes good business sense for GitHub and others marketing AI code assistant products to suggest that these tools no longer fill a supporting role, but have instead apotheosized into full-fledged experts. AI code assistants able to program at the level of senior engineers would be an obvious boon for businesses with software engineering departments. Companies want to see tangible productivity gains before investing in these tools, and team happiness<\/a> has so far been a less compelling selling point than increased throughput. Aspirations and intentions aside, the AI code assistant expert<\/i> remains in the realm of science fiction. What may happen in the next year, five-years, or decade is yet to be seen. Perhaps with products personalized to a company\u2019s codebase like GitHub Copilot Enterprise even the notoriously skeptical professional developers that congregate on Hacker News will acknowledge the possibility of an AI code expert.<\/p>\n

But today there is a demographic of developers that already treats AI code assistants as experts: junior developers.<\/p>\n

The needs and experiences of early career developers around AI code assistants has been woefully understudied. This is a shame as nowhere is the issue of whether AI code assistants are experts or interns more important or contentious.<\/p>\n

I argue that beginning programmers can benefit from AI code assistants. Although caution should be exercised by new developers until (if ever) these tools can actually serve the role of experts, but there is no sense in gatekeeping this tech. AI is for tinkerers<\/a>: beginning, expert, and every ability level in-between. New learners should be encouraged to experiment with these tools early and often in order to discover some of the unique and surprising ways that AI has already augmented the education of many new developers. My goal in this post is to shine a light onto how this segment of the developer community\u2014a group which is as enthusiastic and curious about the potential of these AI code assistants as their more seasoned counterparts\u2014are using this tech. Pedagogical use cases for these tools are only beginning to be theorized, and what group is better situated to discover them than newbies themselves?<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Is This A Junior Developer?<\/h2>\n

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Before hopping into my findings, I want to outline several of the unique challenges that hindered this inquiry. First, because developers are always learning it is necessary to differentiate between the experiences of junior developers learning how to code, and mid and senior level developers that can code already, but are using AI code assistants to learn a new language, tool, library, or part of the stack. Both of these developer types use AI code assistants, but for this article I am only concerned with the former.<\/p>\n

Another challenge is the imprecision and negative connotations attached to the junior developer rank. The term “junior” promotes ageist assumptions equating relative youth with inexperience or, worse, incompetence. What is more, the term “junior” is unreliable and prone to ambiguity. Experience level is generally self-reported and subjective, particularly online. Ability often has to be inferred when researching the experiences of new learners. External hiring practices within the discipline offer little help. After my own stint as an intern<\/a> for an engineering department, I jumped straight to the rank of \u201cFrontend Engineer\u201d not owing to my virtuosic skill but because my company didn\u2019t have juniors.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s also worth mentioning the sources and methods I employ, and why I ultimately chose to focus on Reddit. There is a lot of promoted content about AI targeted to early career developers which I do not consider useful to my inquiry. FreeCodeCamp<\/a> has extensive content tagged #AI<\/a>, such as \u201cHow to Integrate AI into Your Serverless App With Amazon Bedrock<\/a>\u201d by Sam Williams<\/a>, an AWS Consultant and Trainer<\/a>. Similarly, the Code Newbie Community<\/a> feed includes a post by Ariel Weinberger<\/a> entitled \u201cEvery Developer Should Know How To Add AI To His Toolkit!<\/a>.\u201d Although these types of posts reveal the ubiquity of AI in the early career developer community, they are less interesting to me for two reasons. First, this are top-down content fed to junior developers and not grassroots examples highlighting their unique voices and perspectives. Second, I saw no promoted posts in this type of forum that urged new learners to use AI code assistants as tutors. This was curious to me, as the use case of the AI tutor is touted so frequently. Khan Academy\u2019s AI tutor Khanmigo<\/a>, for instance, promises to automate computer science instruction:<\/p>\n

Learning to code has never been more accessible. Khanmigo\u2019s interactive experiences and real-time feedback will help learners hone their computer science skills.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Khanmigo, which is still in beta, is intended to democratize access to 1-on-1 instruction while offering significant support to overburdened educators. However, as we near the end of 2023 Khan Academy\u2019s AI tutor has not caught on in the developer community as a means for reskilling or upskilling.<\/p>\n

Reddit is hands-down the most vibrant community hosting conversations on the subject of how junior developers use AI code assistants. Unlike StackOverflow or Hacker News, which have historically been unwelcoming to new coders, Reddit has whole subreddits devoted to learning how to program that act as safe spaces for these newbies to discuss their needs, struggles, and experiences. The remainder of this post dives deeply into these important conversations. It is my hope that by offering qualitative insight into the AI code assistant’s pedagogical function we in the tech industry can expand the conversation around this transformative technology, both in terms of personas and use cases.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\u201cI just copy and pasted the code to see if it worked (it did)\u201d<\/h2>\n

The subject of how AI code assistants succeed as instructional aids is taken up with great enthusiasm across the span of Reddit\u2019s programming communities. Many host questions and conversations relating to whether GPT should be used to reskill in the discipline of software engineering.<\/p>\n

Below is one illustrative example from the r\/learnprogramming<\/a> subreddit posted by user prog_22<\/a>:<\/p>\n

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Do any of you use chat-gpt to learn (should I use it)?<\/h3>\n

I created a chess game with vanilla javascript<\/p>\n