Rohit Krishnan on how AI coding tools are eliminating entry-level programming tasks - and what this means for the pipeline of future senior engineers.
“The most important career question in tech right now. If juniors can't learn by doing junior work because AI does it first, where do seniors come from in 10 years?”
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I've been thinking about this constantly. My team just decided not to hire juniors this cycle because 'AI handles the tasks we'd give them.' But who mentors the next generation? We're eating the seed corn.
The apprenticeship model survived the IDE, survived Stack Overflow, survived GitHub Copilot. But this time feels different. The tasks juniors learn on are the exact tasks AI does best.
Counter-argument: maybe the junior role just shifts. Instead of writing CRUD endpoints, juniors learn to architect systems and evaluate AI output. The skill floor goes up, but the ceiling goes up too.