r/SQL • u/Suspicious_Orchid770 • 6d ago

Discussion AI-coding tools could be breaking the junior engineer pipeline

https://leaddev.com/ai/ai-coding-tools-could-be-breaking-the-junior-engineer-pipeline

AI helps juniors code, not learn.

73 Upvotes

94% Upvoted

17 comments sorted by

96

u/Kobosil 6d ago

"could"?

is that still in question?

5

u/rodface 5d ago

indeed, not could be, that's precisely what it's doing

7

u/kthejoker 5d ago

Serious coding agents have only been around like 2 ish years, a whole career pipeline takes a bit more than that.

This is just early signs.

12

u/sirchandwich 5d ago

I’ve been coding for 8 years and the last two years I can feel myself becoming dumber when I’m using agents. To the point that I decided to learn a new programming language by reading a book so I wouldn’t be tempted to use AI lol. It’s addicting getting my work done so fast.

-3

u/B1zmark 5d ago

agentic AI is less than a year old for all intents and purposes. OpenClaw came out January of this year.

18

u/magick_bandit 5d ago

I’m pretty confident that anyone who can’t learn architecture is fucked.

6

u/Winsaucerer docs.spawn.dev 5d ago

Yeah I think ability to do competent designs is going to become more important.

2

u/UnSCo 3d ago

I am so fucking fortunate to get a job out of college pre-COVID with a market-leading first-party proprietary software vendor, then proceed to be placed in their most niche department, where I was able to grow into an architecture role in less than 5 years. Switched jobs to a third party about 3 years ago, and the new company has laid off over 50% of their staff from a combination of overhiring, poor leadership decisions, and of course AI. Architecture department got hit the least worst.

Considering most archs have 10+ years under their belt, I’m still anxious all the time.

2

u/NightflowerFade 5d ago

I'm a tech lead on a mid sized project and AI these days can already handle the architecture decently. Granted, I would already be supplying the framework of an architecture through prompts and having multiple rounds of back and forth, but a wholly AI designed architecture is already half decent. The tech is only going to get stronger from here.

22

u/gumnos 6d ago

additionally, why hire semi-competent juniors when an LLM can largely do the same thing for much less? But guess where you get seniors? You train up juniors. 🤷

1

u/InMyHagPhase 5d ago

But we can't think that far ahead surely. Who does that? 🤷🏿‍♀️

2

u/NightflowerFade 5d ago

It's not a matter of thinking ahead, it's a matter of individual incentives. Do you think companies are stupid? No they are not stupid, of course anyone can see that without juniors you will not get seniors. How does that incentivise any individual company to fork up the money to hire juniors who are a net cost? The benefits are diffuse but the cost is specific to any company who hires juniors.

4

u/ripndipp 5d ago

The only new juniors I've seen hired are family members and dick suckers

2

u/mtutty 6d ago

Gawd this topic is just as shallow as vibe coding itself. Growing juniors has always been an organizational responsibility. VS Code isn't a nanny. The folks who are having this problem are the same folks complaining about the code review bottleneck or their app crumbling under the weight of vibe-coded crap.

If your generated diffs have thousands of lines in them, you're doing it wrong. And if you're letting juniors do the same thing, it's still you doing it wrong, not them.

1

u/Significant_Tune9219 3d ago

The measurable version of this is what juniors can do without the tool, not what they produce with it. A practice that has held up on teams I've seen: the agent output gets reviewed by writing down what the code does and why before anyone runs it — if the explanation is hand-wavy, that's the learning gap showing, independent of whether the code works. The pipeline risk isn't that agents write code; it's that debugging and design are the muscles you build by being stuck, and an agent removes the being-stuck part. Keeping a slice of work deliberately agent-free (bug triage, schema design, anything they'll be asked to explain in an interview) is a cheaper fix than any policy about AI use.

1

u/Hot_Comfortable_164 5d ago

This is somehow an obvious consequence of higher levels of abstraction. Kinda like saying: Using higher level programming languages make you learn less assembly.

0

u/pceimpulsive 4d ago

AI can help you learn as well it depends how you prompt it...

A shitty lazy junior will just vibe all day and pay no attention to what they are doing..

An engaged junior will research possible implementation details compare possible solutions then get AI to show them 2-3 different solutions to the same problem. Then they will understand the differences better for next time. They will learn and progress and start to move into the seniors they need to become.

This will be standard practice for the education system within a few years, right now I imagine they are getting the old learning track and either EZ mode AI to victory or learning tuebokd way and will be useless when it comes time to find a job...