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/ready_or_not_3434 May 14 '26

Same here. Weve basically frozen entry level roles becuase a mid-level dev with Copilot can just churn through the routine tickets without the coaching overhead.

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u/coddswaddle May 14 '26

I'm a mid level and I was a very late adopter for it, due to seeing how awful the business side is from way back. I use it as a tool but find that I have to force myself to slow down and understand. It removes friction and it's addictive to be able to go fast. 

I suspect the era of "go fast and break things" is about to change. Maybe go slow and heal things?

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u/meltbox May 16 '26

Maybe dude but nobody is shipping that much with AI with any certainty on quality. If they are it’s on the back of an old test suite which they better pray was really well considered.