Expert Beginner, Untrained Senior

Beginner Experts 

Definition: someone with little to no knowledge that can produce expert level work. 

This is where we are headed with all the LLMs in our pockets. I am currently a junior in college, and yet some of the work I am able to produce and ship is nowhere near my level as a student. I did not realize it until I spoke to a senior software dev that, after taking a look at my code, mentioned it. 

It is pretty apparent that the level LLMs are evolving and with tools like Cursor and Claude beginner experts will be more and more common. It is a good and a bad thing. 

It is good because people like me can quickly build things and try them out. 

But it is very bad because we never get to understand fully what it is we are doing. “Know the rules before you break them” I heard once. Yet  in today’s age it looks like we will not have to know the rules. 

I just need to know where to find some informations and then vibe code my way to the solution. 

Would this be the same as using steroids at the gym ? It speeds up your metabolism and creates faster results but in the long term it might be harmful. I am not entirely sure how bad this looks for the software engineering field in the next few years to be frank. 

Would our knowledge ceiling be dictated by the progress of LLMs? If their knowledge is bound to exceed that of humans in a few years maybe that is not a bad thing. 

So keeping that as an assumption, the difference between two developers will still be their own skills. The more I can personally do by myself the better I would be able to utilize AI assistants. 

My current view is that Expert beginners will likely be Untrained Seniors and that is bad. The demand for good developers will only rise.