Would it work in this case? Had he asked about this in a team, he would be told about the existing approach and that'd be it. I've been on the both sides, as junior questioning common practices and as senior answering such questions - and it always resulted in transfer of common knowledge, not some breakthrough.

I totally support searching for the new truths, but we must not forget why the phrase "do not roll your own crypto" exists. It is ok, or maybe it even MUST be done by students and researchers, but I am not so sure about juniors working on production systems. Still fine if you work in R&D department

Yes, just like evil geniuses should have their plans for world domination reviewed by a 5 year old

unfortunately, I have a feeling that in the age of LLMs, this junior on the team will have no impetus to actually put in effort and _think_ about such a problem

We survived the age of StackOverflow. I don't see why LLM's will be the death of critical thinking where all else has failed so far.

Because SO at least requires you to THINK a little about what do you have a problem with.

With LLMs, you don't even need that. Just copy paste the error and you get a response. Copy and paste the Jira ticket description and you get a response. This wasn't possible with SO. Yes, none of those will likely work straight away but the point is that less thinking is required.

Hopefully, the junior's code will be reviewed before it gets merged

I can't imagine blindly committing what LLMs spit out will get you very far, much less into a job.

It's quite fashionable, people call it "vibe coding" with Cursor in "yolo mode"

I don't think LLMs are actually good enough for their code to work without any changes in all but the very simplest of cases.

Did we survive the age of StackOverflow though? The market (globally) is absolutely flooded with not-even-mediocre software devs who are effectively doing what an LLM is i.e. finding the most plausible looking answers on SO and somehow munging them together, without any real understanding of what they're doing nor why it's working (or not working). The number of people charging contract rates yet lacking an understanding of actual software design principles (largely language agnostic) and no idea how computers actually work, is scary.

Totally, the future is nearly identical to the past.

It’s nice to have someone around who doesn’t understand that I’ve given them hard work. Big, open ended tasks like “invent a photogrammetry pipeline”

I think a presence of even single senior can dampen the questioning part. So I prefer all junior team to make some big path breaking changes.