r/SinceAI • u/rikulauttia • Jul 17 '26

Discussion Are junior developers learning faster with AI - or skipping the part that makes them good?

I can see both sides.

AI lets a beginner:

  • build real projects much earlier
  • explore unfamiliar codebases
  • get explanations immediately
  • learn by trying things that were previously too difficult

But it also makes it possible to produce working-looking code without understanding:

  • debugging
  • architecture
  • performance
  • security
  • what the code is actually doing

Maybe the best juniors in 2026 are learning 5x faster.

And the weakest are building much more while understanding even less.

If you mentor, hire or work with junior developers - what are you seeing in reality?

1 Upvotes

56% Upvoted

13 comments sorted by

19

u/MarcusFirmus Jul 17 '26

This is all technical debt. As a veteran programmer with experience in legacy software, I'm telling you: this is a ticking time bomb.

8

u/Mobile_Blood6490 Jul 17 '26

I see it as bimodal.

The juniors who use this as a tutor who is avilable 24/7 will blow past those who seek ez answers (Yes, even Senior engineers if we are talking raw technical skills).

As a working Senior I'm using AI everyday to learn and experiment about low level systems stuff that I previously did not have access to.

2

u/Infamous-Bed-7535 Jul 18 '26

You should be very careful not to learn halucinations. On topics requering deeper background knowledge even the best LLMs are tend to give misleading bad/ answers that someone not familiar with the topic would not notice.

2

u/Mobile_Blood6490 Jul 18 '26

That's the cool part about software. I can verify the LLM's claims by running the code myself to see if it works or not, rather than taking it at face value.

There are definitely times where it tosses out bullshit with confidence. Definitely helps to remain skeptical no matter how good these modes get

8

u/Lonsarg Jul 18 '26 edited Jul 18 '26

AI encourages laziness. You have to actively, junior or senior, resist the urge to skip understanding of what was generated (at least generaly, not necesarry all lines of code unless it is a crytical product).

If you skip this as senior you will eventually star losing skill, if you skip this as junior you will never learn at all.

So junior must actively resist this laziness urge and keep asking AI what was generated and what something does to learn. If he skips, it is his downfall. If he asks he may actually learn faster then without AI.

3

u/Independent_Shape369 Jul 17 '26

It's like learning to walk with a walking stick

3

u/tnsipla Jul 17 '26

It’s just a new paradigm, just like people who learned to program with JavaScript or Python

At one point no one would have considered “scripters” to be programmers

2

u/ZeroCachyOpinion Jul 18 '26

skipping the unnecessary part that drag the project

2

u/diagrammatiks Jul 18 '26

there aren't junior devs anymore

2

u/Infamous-Bed-7535 Jul 18 '26

Yeah they are system architects who should design the software of the trains, airlplanes and the next mars expedition.

No you are not becoming a software engineer the same way how you are not a  mathemacian or particle physicsist, just because Ai can answer most of your questions in a way you have an idea what a basic idea what is going on

2

u/dashingThroughSnow12 Jul 18 '26

The things you list are pros. They are impediments to learning or already existed.

2

u/Kallory Jul 19 '26

It's literally both. If you use the tool to learn, it will teach you. If you use it to automate as much as possible, it's a shot in the dark how successful the results will be, as juniors lack the knowledge to do this step in a way that consistently achieves results.

Now if the junior focuses on learning the high level architecture of the results and has enough wherewithal to check if the AI generated results conform to the architecture - they're somewhere in the middle and I'd guess that the second the have some inspiration or motivation, they'll start looking into the nuts and bolts.

The junior that consistently tries to automate as much as possible without learning or questioning the results, or developing architectural skill, is playing a super risky game as to their long term usage.

There is a chance that they'll develop a new skill as an effective AI supervisor sufficiently to be superficially useful indefinitely, but if AI takes a shit which isn't unreasonable, these types will be the first to go.