you have 35 years of experience and have already built up the learning capability and general framework to acquire new knowledge. you know how to use agentic coding as a tool to supplement your work. the juniors who start today don't have that, they overrely on agentic coding and do not know what they don't know

IMO, by the time todays juniors would have 5-10 years of expected experience, the entire field will be something different altogether. Language choice distribution will collapse (if not change altogether), whole new modalities of monitoring and progressive delivery guardrails will come into play, essentially creating a 24/7 incremental rollout of pure agentic code, correctness will be determined by a mix of language features and self-monitoring by models in production and automated testing against production snapshots in pre-production, and deep debugging will the be province of a select group of engineers and there will be a pathway to those roles for juniors, but those roles will be coveted and difficult to break into (and probably will require education and maybe even informal accreditation).

someone probably made this same argument against certain frameworks over the years and juniors still figured it out. we need to stop trying to babysit learning for hypothetical situations.

the bar to "start" is lower and the bar to actually competency is higher now, juniors who want to actually learn instead of just pressing enter over and over again will do so regardless of whatever you do to "help" them.

Exactly this. We need to be more precise than blanket statements like "agentic coding is a trap" and start figuring out what a "tasteful" application of agentic coding looks like. ChatGPT is destroying liberal arts curriculums because students can choose to not do anything of the thinking themselves and produce mediocre work that passes the bar. I think the same problem is showing itself with agentic coding, just with more directly measurable consequences (because the pile of software ends up failing in a more spectacular way than the pile of bad writing).

Self-taught, "junior" here.

Due to English-language limitation my most adult life, I struggled to code. Used visual coding etc. But of course, I can't make a living on drag-and-drop harness.

Comes in GPT-3.5, accelerated my learning. Now I'm running my incorporated company, just launched one software-hardware hybrid product. Second one is a micro-SaaS in closed beta.

The point is: when people use "juniors" as a fixed shaped blobs of matter, they focus on the juniors that were in any case going to make mistakes: AI or not. Misses the key point of agentic usage.

If a junior builds something with agents that turns into a mess they can’t debug, that will teach them something. If they care about getting better, they will learn to understand why that happened and how to avoid it next time.

It’s not all that different than writing code directly and having it turn into a mess they can’t debug—something we all did when we were learning to program.

It is in many ways far easier to write robust, modular, and secure software with agents than by hand, because it’s now so easy to refactor and write extensive tests. There is nothing magical about coding by hand that makes it the only way to learn the principles of software design. You can learn through working with agents too.

> the juniors who start today don't have that, they overrely on agentic coding and do not know what they don't know

Y'all need to stop worrying about the kids.

They're smarter than us and will run circles around us.

They're going to look at us like dinosaurs and they're going to solve problems of scale and scope 10x or more than what we ever did.

Hate to "old man yells at cloud" this, but so many people are falling into the trap because of personal biases.

While the fear that "smartphones might make kids less computer literate" is true, that's because PCs are not as necessary as they once were. The kids that turn into engineers are fine and are every bit as capable.

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