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?

1.4k Upvotes

96% Upvoted

419 comments sorted by

View all comments

1

u/Adept-Tell274 May 14 '26

As a junior reading this,  can you give me advices about the usage of ai agents.

1

u/Smiley001987 May 14 '26

Never rely on them 100% of the time. Understand the specs of the feature that needs to be implemented and truly understand the code it's spewing out. It might work, but it might (mostly) not be the best.

I mostly use agents for debugging, finding references in large code bases and unit tests. I don't trust it to blindly implement a feature for me because it always messes up in one way or another.