the juniors who only learned to code with AI are going to have a rough time in about 5 years

Posted by Motor_Ordinary336@reddit | learnprogramming | View on Reddit | 227 comments

Two juniors on my team. Both ship fast. Both grew up on Cursor and Claude Code basically

last week one of them pushed something that broke in staging and I watched them paste their own function back into Claude going "what does this do." code they wrote on monday. THEIR OWN CODE. that they merged

I know how I sound. every senior ever has complained about juniors not knowing X and I swear I'm trying not to be that guy. but when I came up you had no choice but to sit with broken shit for hours and slowly build a map of the system in your head, and that part sucked but it's also where the actual learning lived (for me anyway). now you don't have to suffer through it. you just ask.

(not an anti-AI post btw, I use it constantly)

year 1 is fine, year 1 they ship features. it's year 5 I keep thinking about. one of them on call at 2am, prod doing something insane, AI confidently wrong, and they need to reason through an unfamiliar codebase under real pressure. I don't know what that looks like for someone who never built the muscle