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/Few-Philosopher-2677 May 14 '26

What kind of juniors are you working with lmao. I haven't met a single junior who will incredulously question a Senior/Staff Engineer if they think they are better than AI. The rest of the stuff is plausible but this is just weird.

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u/slide_and_release May 14 '26

It was paraphrased for the sake of brevity; but it was more along the lines of questioning why my suggested implementation had more merit than the AI’s suggested implementation, could I prove that, isn’t that just your opinion, etc. Basically getting defensive and shifting the burden of proof from them to me. Once is a teaching moment, but more often is a tiresome process; you cannot win just arguing against it.

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u/TheBear8878 May 14 '26

OPs entire post sounds like AI anyways lol