I have been at this long enough to see the full cycle. When Stack Overflow came out, people said it was cheating. Same with autocomplete. Same with Copilot. And now the same thing with ChatGPT.

But something feels different this time. Senior devs are using AI constantly and loudly criticizing juniors for doing the same thing. I have watched it happen on my own team.

A colleague of mine, probably ten years of experience, gives long speeches about how juniors need to understand the fundamentals and not lean on AI. Then I look at his commit history. He is clearly using AI to write boilerplate, docstrings, test cases. The code has that texture.

I am not judging him for using it. I use it too. What bothers me is the double standard. We are applying completely different rules to ourselves than to people just starting out.

The honest version of the conversation would be something like: here is how I use AI, here is where I still make myself think through the problem without it, and here is why the balance matters. That would actually help juniors build the right habits.

Instead we get vague warnings about fundamentals from people who are delegating the same things they warn about.

Am I just in a weird team or is this a pattern others are seeing too?