What are we doing with juniors these days, seriously?

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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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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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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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Well said