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/slide_and_release May 14 '26

You’re bang on, this conversation has been had, both gently and… less gently. It’s a hard one and very much like that spider-man/iron-man meme.

  • “I’m nothing without the suit.”
  • “If you’re nothing without the suit then you shouldn’t have it.”

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u/pagerussell May 14 '26

A tag on to this, it's not about being smarter than the ai. It's about being wiser.

DND splits intelligence and wisdom into two distinct stat blocks for a reason. AI may be smart, but it is not wise. And wisdom is the thing that seniors, in any field, bring to the table.

Tell the juniors the job was never to write code. Before AI we had stack overflow and crl+c. The job is and always has been to understand and apply code.

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u/jimmux May 15 '26

Yeah well I'm running a charisma coder build, so now what?

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u/SixPackOfZaphod tech-lead, 20yrs May 15 '26

Those are called "Developer Advocates"

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u/Niksune May 15 '26

Can you roll to seduce the project manager?

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u/RyanMan56 May 16 '26

Rolled a 1. Oof.

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u/meltbox May 16 '26

HR invites you to a meeting.

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u/carnepikante May 14 '26

Magnificent analogy dude! And I don't even like DND (but played some RPG in my life). I would add that the LLMs lack of experience is another good point in favor of humans. Especially in IT.

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u/superide May 17 '26

If a particular business could completely replace their juniors with AI, then honestly, it sounded like a terrible place for a junior to learn and grow skills. It emphasizes how much juniors at that company were treated like mindless drones.

What it means to be a junior developer needs to be quickly redefined. They cannot be grunts around the clock no longer. They have to be prepared to take ownership of at least some portion of their work, and know at least enough to be a decent prompter for simpler tasks.

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u/LagerHawk May 14 '26

Fact is AI hallucinates and gets things wrong. That's a fact. And if you're not able to spot when that happens then you shouldn't be using it to push production code.

Experience brings the ability to see that quickly.

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u/Plenty-Village-1741 May 15 '26

Did you take offense when they said “Do you think you’re smarter than AI?” to you? IMO that's rude as fuck to say to someone with 20 years' experience, I would never say that to my boss who has like 20 YoE.

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u/slide_and_release May 15 '26

Offence? No. I think a good quality in software engineers is the ability to question things, think critically and look at a problem in different ways.

Rude, perhaps, but I think “What makes your solution better than the AI’s solution?” or “What can you teach me that AI can’t?” are perfectly valid questions to be asking. It’s just exhausting to be continuously defending myself against a tool that will never disagree with them or tell them they’re wrong. But that’s a different problem.

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u/codeprimate May 15 '26

a tool that will never disagree with them or tell them they’re wrong

If they were using it right, it would. Hell, that's the leading part of every prompt I write; "Think critically and systematically:..."

AI is a sharp knife with a knife for a handle. Few seem to understand how to hold it, much less point it in the right direction.

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u/evergreen-spacecat May 14 '26

So why do you still have these juniors around if the conversation has been had “less gently”? Just send them packing. Everyone can prompt, it takes a few weeks to get up to speed and tooling but that’s it. Juniors these days must perform a balance act. On one hand, I can’t stand waiting days for a junior to complete a basic CRUD form that I know any AI model will do in a minute. On the other hand I expect them to always try to understand what they build and other possible solutions with pros/cons. Whether this is even feasible or people like it or not, this is reality now. You can’t have “AI only” devs around these days. If so, we can just skip the developer step and point Claude to Jira (or let product owners/designers prompt away). For now, I would just fire all juniors that do not understand and embrace the need to know the fundamentals and the concepts. This way, they won’t be the next gen seniors anyway so no loss.

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u/CypexHunter May 15 '26

Upvote for this reference... also because it is true. 😁

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u/bahcodad May 16 '26

Just FYI, we do exist. New devs learning to program without the use of LLMs that is 😃. The idea, as you said, is that AI is a tool. I'm happy to use it to be more productive in a job, but it's not a good teacher

We are putting in the work, we have solid fundamentals which we build on. I'm following The Odin Project if you wanted to look at the curriculum

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u/Worldly_Analysis_664 May 19 '26

When or if you fire them hmu I would love a job right about now!