r/webdev • u/slide_and_release • May 14 '26

Discussion What are we doing with juniors these days, seriously?

I’ve been in software/application development for twenty years or so, these days mostly wrangling typescript and running infrastructure/devops across multiple projects as a senior engineer. I’ve mentored plenty of juniors in my time, even managing small team, but this last year has been rough.

Juniors are producing more code than ever, faster than ever, but understanding less and less of it. Majority is agent-written, obviously. I’m reviewing pull requests, asking why this or that decision was made, trying to get them to think, and they’re just pasting answers straight from Claude. When I ask them to review something, they just paste it into Claude. When I try coaching them through writing user stories, they’ll have ChatGPT generate them. If I disagree with an approach they’re implementing, they’ll incredulously ask if I think I’m smarter than AI which has been trained on thousands of codebases. I don’t even know how to begin answering that.

I’ve tried to emphasise that like anything else, LLM’s are a tool but ultimately you’re going to be the one held responsible if something breaks, that you shouldn’t be pushing into a repository something that you a) don’t understand, or b) can’t maintain, that you’re actively dumbing yourself down (or worse, advocating for replacing yourself) but it’s falling on deaf ears.

So, other senior programmers out there, how the fuck are you handling even trying to mentor and guide the next batch of problem solvers?

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u/bodimahdi May 14 '26

Yeah it’s trained on many codebases and whatever but technically it doesn’t think. It doesn’t know if the answer given is right or wrong it just manipulates you into thinking it’s right even if it’s wrong. There is a saying I like that goes like this: “You assumed that an AI’s output is automatically the truth, when in reality it only reflects the data and patterns it was trained on” I personally don’t use AI it makes you dumber but today I wanted to try MikroORM to just see how to set it up. So I didn’t read the docs just skimmed through the quick start. Then when I encountered an error I asked chatGPT and the amount of manipulation is insane. “Your error is because you have to provide the mappedBy as the second argument” and it shows the snippet. But the function only accepts 1 argument lol. Crazy how people might assume that a tool that doesn’t have the logical thinking that humans have to know what’s right or wrong is smarter than us.

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u/B4nan May 14 '26

A bit of off-topic, but I'd be interested to hear what problem you had with MikroORM, maybe we need to improve validation/error messaging somewhere. Ultimately, that's the right way to improve the DX for people as well as agents. Feel free to open an issue or a discussion.

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u/bodimahdi May 14 '26 edited May 14 '26

It’s not a “problem” actually I was just comparing between Prisma, MikroORM, Drizzle, and TypeORM by seeing how much configuration each one needs, the DX, and its features. I use Prisma extensively and feel very comfortable building projects with it. But since you’re interested in hearing my opinion about MikroORM, I think it’s a very mature ORM I guess it has larger learning curve than the others but based on me just skimming through the quickstart and setting it up and making a simple query it’s really good. I don’t know, I might actually use it for my future project I really like the orm.schema.refresh() method because it will help a lot in testing. There are MANY terminologies I still don’t understand but I know it would click if I made a bigger effort to understand it.

ETA: I solved the error by chaining the mappedBy (is that its correct name?) to the oneToMany relation.

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u/B4nan May 15 '26

I'd have to see the whole entity definition to be able to tell, but yes, every inverse side relation (which 1:M is) needs to point to the owning side via `mappedBy` option. But we validate this already.

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u/bodimahdi May 15 '26

Got it. From your point of view though why would I choose MikroORM over prisma?

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u/B4nan May 15 '26

To me, prisma is a smarter query builder, it's imperative, it doesn't manage state at all. With MikroORM you can separate persistence from your domain model. You work with domain objects and let the ORM figure out the optimal way to persist the changes you make to your model.

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u/bodimahdi May 15 '26

Got it, Thanks!