How do I personally have the skill? I built it the old fashioned way: decades of doing this, starting with vi and hand coding assembly, through IDEs and high level languages, and now with distributed tracing on ephemeral serverless deployments.

How do juniors develop it? Yeah, that's the tough part. Those years spent slogging through very tedious work got me here. You have to exercise to build muscle. Maybe we need to find some way to let people exercise the skills without the hands-on slog? I'm honestly not sure, how are you seeing it handled where you are?

Yeah that's my point. Sooner or later a human is going to have to go hunting "inside the box", and those humans will have to be capable of doing so competently.

I'm not seeing post-AI training of juniors handled at all, anywhere. The closest thing is what my employer does where for liability reasons every command executed by an AI agent, even as simple as an ls, has to be manually approved by the developer. This has the side effect of walking you through the AI's analysis, which can be quite educational.

Given the general culture of corporate cost-cutting (the whole appeal of AI is it doesn't need a benefits package), it's possible we're heading into a future where people trained pre-AI turn into a dedicated guild of professional troubleshooters, demanding fat paychecks to parachute in and put out fires when a company's giant blob of agents fails and their in-house staff lacks the deep knowledge to figure it out.

When compilers appeared, junior developers didn't have to develop the skill to understand assembly. Worrying about them not learning that skill because using compilers is so convenient would have been a bad move.

Now the juniors are cooked anyway, but not because they didn't learn the skill of software development.