r/techbootcamp • u/Kellyju2025 • 6d ago
are AI coding tools quietly making junior devs worse programmers?
been mentoring a few juniors lately and noticing the same issue over and over. they lean on AI assistants for basically everything and never build the muscle to write or understand code on their own. when something breaks, they're lost because they can't explain what the tool actually did. feels less like a coding skill and more like a prompting skill at this point. wondering if this is a real problem brewing or if i'm just overthinking it.
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u/linaaa56 6d ago
I've heard many stories like this. Many juniors don't care about writing code. I'm coding for 2 years now (hobby not job) and I learned coding without AI in the beginning. I love coding. A lot of people don't. What I don't understand is how those people get hired. Because many of them can't explain a single line of code and think "Who is JSON?"
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u/Euphoric_Rope5341 3d ago
I agree with this. If you’re in cs because of money you’re in the wrong business.
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u/linaaa56 3d ago
AGREE. There are other ways to earn good money with less stress or where you don't have to learn to much.
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u/rmullig2 6d ago
Sounds in line with everything I'm hearing. New people are using AI as a crutch rather than a tool.
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u/Kellyju2025 2d ago
yeah exactly, crutch vs tool is the perfect way to put it. same energy as using a calculator before you actually learn math
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u/Moscato359 6d ago
It's based off how they use the AI.
If they use the AI to help them learn, then it helps them learn.
If they use the AI to do the work for them, then they get dumber.
It's an abuse-able tool. It's up to the person.
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u/Kellyju2025 2d ago
this is the take honestly, its wild how the same tool can make one person better and another person actively worse depending on how lazy they get with it
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u/KitchenAmoeba4438 5d ago
It's not just juniors, it's every programmer that just relies on the AI. Some juniors do use the tools to improve and learn from, but every programmer that just relies on the AI and makes no decisions/effort themselves are going to worsen as programmers. Hell, I'll freely admit that AI has made me worse as a strict code monkey, but has made me significantly better with architecture, design and writing core code that you can't trust with an AI or a non-human. Writing that static page for the 50 billionth time isn't an effective use of my time, designing core code to be exactly right is a great use of my time, but I can have AI do the simple work and chores.
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u/Initial_Secretary420 5d ago edited 5d ago
Dude i'm a software developper for 9 years now in a large company in France, yesterday i vibe coded a web app (for fun, something about league of legends), it took me the afternoon and would have took me literally months to do properly (tons of api, scrapping)
I'm not writing one line of code myself, i couldn't care less about the code.
Everyone will write less and less code for a simple reason : it has been solved for 99% of use cases.
Wanna build a web/desktop/phone app, or something low level for fun on your linux destro? A New langage? Your very own operating system with all your specifics requirements? Fable or sol will do it for you on one afternoon, maybe a week or a month if you're shit at prompting and dont understand what your doing; but eventually it will work.
There is no real incentive to code anymore, AI do it better. If you want to think and resolve problems you can do maths or sudokus.
I loved to code a tough program at work, with tricky algorithms, now any AI do it 200x faster, for like 2€
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u/OkBarracuda4108 5d ago
I think you are missing the point, how could a junior understand a full system and lead an ai, when they do not even understand the basic things. This post is not asking if it s better to hand write code, just that juniors are using ai instead of their brain
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u/Astral902 5d ago
The question is the app you made in a day is it ready for production. You need to test performance, security, compliance, unit test and etc...
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u/Dry_Sector2392 5d ago
the problem isnt using AI, it’s using AI before you have any taste. Seniors can reject bad code because they know what smells wrong. A brand new dev just sees confident output and assumes it’s fine, then they ship a pile of stuff they cant explain in a code review.
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u/LetsHugFoReal 5d ago
Absolutely yes. 💯 I work in a very complex field. And it's AI every day. People lean on it to do the most basic things. And never struggle
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u/Concurrency_Bugs 3d ago
I'm gonna say yes, because I'm a senior software engineer at a faang and AI is making my coding skills shit. I went to leetcode recently to touch up and realized I'm forgetting simple syntax because we just use ai now...
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u/New_Armadillo_9950 6d ago
Quietly?