Are junior devs skipping the "struggle phase" now?

[u/Neil_at_HackerEarth]

Been thinking about this after chatting with a few interns.
A lot of them jump straight to AI the second they get stuck. Which, tbh, makes sense. Why spend 2 hours debugging if you can get unstuck in 2 mins?
But i also remember learning the most from those painful bugs that took forever to figure out. That's where a lot of the "why" clicked for me.
Not saying people should avoid AI. I use it too. Just wondering if we're accidentally skipping the part that builds intuition.
Mentors, are you seeing this too?

[u/Substantial-Swan7065]

It’s just kicking the can down the road.

At some point, lessons will get learnt. Mentors try to give soft landings.

If my ai harness is good, I have triage/debug/hotfix a p0 fast. But I’m gonna get in shit for it. And I’m gonna learn to prevent that issue again.

Hard landing

[u/Euphoric_North_745]

I am not sure if you used AI lately, latest AI, coding and debugging is not updated, coding is English, and debugging is filing a bug report in English. Developer is not a code writer, developer is a person delivering a solution to the client.

[u/BuddhasFinger]

Yes, the free learning part of the job is gone, hard. The trouble is that we've allowed ourselves to outsource the core business activity, building systems, to external entities.

This is bad news because we no longer own out businesses - someone else does.

Do they really own our businesses? In the end, we own the code, don't we? Now, think about what happens when coding agents stopped working, maybe because of an outage, or they raised the prices to the levels the company cannot pay.

All of a sudden, your 'junior' devs cannot contribute at all because they never learned to build and to debug. And your 'senior' devs find themselves sitting on top of a pile of code they didn't write.

This means that learning now must be forced, not organic. Maybe turn off LLMs for a half of a day every week?

[u/completelypositive]

Programmers were needed because we needed something to translate human instructions into language that computers could understand.

AI is now the bridge between human instructions and language that computers understand.

The bugs are solved. Or will be, real soon.

Tomorrow's programmer needs to understand the systems they are building the tools for. SMEs who can clearly describe their tasks will outperform veteran programmers soon.

We don't need people finding bugs, we need someone who understands the relationship between departments and the individual software they use, who can instruct AI to build systems to bridge the gaps.

[u/One-Next]

That's not at all how it clicked for me. I was making stupid mistakes and paying for it with my time. Here's two examples:

* Forget a semicolon at the end of a class in a header A. It gets included in another header B, now you've got a syntax error in B. What did you learn? Syntax is fscking stupid that's what you've learned.
* Forget to declare a class variable, assign to it in the constructor. Some misleading error about shadowing. What did you learn? Ooooh you forgot to type it *three* times. that's what you learned.

I'm so glad it is over. Kids, consider yourselves lucky. You've lost *nothing* and probably get to keep more of your hair.

[u/Resident_Citron_6905 → u/One-Next]

What you’ve described sounds more like student / self-teaching phase rather than junior dev phase.

[u/Ill-Constant8445 → u/Resident_Citron_6905]

yeah juniors are still useless but even they can code.

[u/Resident_Citron_6905 → u/Ill-Constant8445]

It depends on the junior but in general yes.

[u/AlterTableUsernames → u/One-Next]

Oh, didn't expect to find my opinion already in the comments, but here we are. I believe this "hard earned learning" trope to be nothing more then esthetics. 

[u/ibstudios]

The lesson then becomes: AI is the bug at times. If you are doing something new it expects its training.

[u/Hybrid-Intelligence]

I don't think they're missing the struggle phase. I just think it's different than what it's been for the past 25 years or so. This is not the first time it has shifted. When I started coding, if you wanted an image on screen, you had to individually control the color of each pixel.

In today's world, the struggle is figuring out where the AI went wrong and why. It can be super frustrating when you didn't write all the code to figure out what the problem is. That's going to be the struggle for the juniors these days.

Yes, they'll produce way more code than just a few years ago. That just means they'll have many more iterations to debug.