AI, as of late, is taking the blame for making junior developers “worse” at writing code, but in my 20 years of experience—junior devs have always ...
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I think the trial by fire bar just moves, and honestly thats fine. 25 years ago shipping code was complicated, no git, little developer tooling and wildly non-standardized compute infrastructure
10 years later we had git, decent tooling and cloud.
The result wasn't better code per se, but we shipped a lot more of it and accomplished a lot more overall as a result.
This is much the same. Artisanal code/systems are simply too slow for many circumstances.
I think about this a lot. I first started tinkering with web dev around 2005, nothing serious just Dreamweaver and terrible MySpace templates. Back then it was enough just to have a website and be online. The rules on aesthetics and accessibility were very loose, if there were any at all.
But CSS/HTML/JS improved year over year. Devices changed size and mobile web became widespread. Social media became a dominating presence. Startups invested tons of money in UI/IX research and developing design standards (e.g. Twitter Bootstrap, Google Material Design).
The tools became better, faster, cheaper and easier and with each improvement, the expectations on web devs increased as well. 20 years ago, if you could build a website, put it online, and have it be half decent looking, you were ahead of the curve.
Now, it needs to work on all screen sizes, be optimized for SEO, optimized for accessibility, optimized for performance, look good, be easy to update by non-technical users, and about 100 other minimum specifications. If you do all of that, you’re just keeping up with the middle of the pack.
I don’t say any of that to complain or be defeatist. I love learning new things and solving new problems so web dev has been a very fulfilling career choice. But for those who don't enjoy those things, web dev and programming careers probably aren’t a good fit. Even with AI, it requires constant study, constant curiosity, and deep-down, some sort of love or passion for that feeling of writing code and seeing it come to life on a screen.
I don’t think AI is en masse coming for our jobs (yet), but I do agree it’s going to raise the bar of expectations for developers once more.
I typically use autocomplete tools, particularly Codeium, which is free. However, I would like to explore other tools that can help enhance my workflow. While I feel confident in my coding skills, I recognize that I need to improve my planning, documentation, and testing abilities. This will be my focus moving forward.
Could anyone please recommend resources and tools that I can utilize in these areas?
Best regards.
This might be a really basic answer, but I’ve found ChatGPT really useful for planning, brainstorming, and big picture type work. It gets some criticism for making mistakes when it comes to precision work, but I find it incredibly valuable when I need to plan things out, or get an overview of how something might work, or just get a jumping off point for some code that might be more specific than what I’d find by googling.
Autocomplete tools are to be used.
I needed this article. As a junior dev myself, I have always felt guilty every time I struggle to solve something and I'm too tired to use Stack so I use ChatGPT. But even in the short time I've been doing that, I've noticed that it's rare for me to feel the need to use AI for an entire project. I want to make something of my own that's new. AI can't do that. But it definitely helps me solve problems that others have had without either scrolling through thousands of answers on Stack. I just wonder what technologies will help the people who'll come after me and how I'll react to those technologies when I'm a senior dev
I was recently reclassified from a junior to mid-level engineer and I have found AI helpful for a few things.
AI has helped me learn proper terminology. For example, today I saw a code example that I didn't understand:
I understand what the code is doing, but I didn't know what the
+was doing. I don't know how I could have Googled the answer, but I asked AI and now I know about the urnary plus operator and what it does.Also with many dev teams shrinking in size, questions may go unanswered for longer periods. I have used AI to ask questions I may have previously asked my teammates. Humans with experience in the code are a better resource than AI, but instead waiting for someone to tell me which method is better for my use case I can ask AI to let me know about the pros and cons of using x over y. Or if I get really close on something and I've debugged to the best of my ability, I might ask AI why it doesn't work. It's far from perfect and the context matters but it has saved my team some time. I've never copied code over from AI, but it can help point me in the right direction when I get stuck.
I really appreciate you for writing this article. This is highly motivating for someone like me who wants to start their career as a software developer but doubts their skills as they need to rely on various sources to solve their queries. But now I am a bit more confident that I would learn eventually through repetition and experience.
Happy to hear you found it helpful! It seems most educational systems are still very restrictive when it comes to how people learn. But really when you get into the corporate office, there are resources everywhere!
AI isn't ruining junior devs—it's just exposing the same struggles they've always faced. Learning to code well takes time, whether it’s through books, forums, Stack Overflow, or AI tools. The goal has always been problem-solving, not memorizing syntax. If anything, AI is just another tool to speed up the process, not replace actual learning. My younger brother was applying to several universities but had no idea how to write a strong personal statement. I suggested he try Academized to buy personal statement online, available at academized.com/buy-personal-statem... here. The writers created a well-structured, engaging statement that showcased his achievements and career aspirations in a compelling way. Thanks to their professional touch, he received offers from multiple universities! If you’re struggling with personal statement writing, this service is highly recommended!
Tbh, this post really helped me get my perspectives set straight. In this advanced age, what I'm more afraid of is how things are going to turn out since everything is moving so fast, with new technologies popping up every day. As a junior dev, I'm so inspired by my senior devs, and I just want to be like them so badly. I know it can't happen overnight, but there's this anxiety in me that makes me feel really overwhelmed sometimes. This post made me realize that a lot of it is normal, and I can get through it with experience, curiosity, and a willingness to learn.
Very glad to hear you found it helpful! That anxiety is perfectly normal! It does time a relatively long time before you start to feel really comfortable working on large and complicated codebases. But eventually, if you give it time, everything just clicks. And it helps to know that the senior developers around you are usually never judging you 😁 they too were anxious once.
This is a great thought and I think that it will help students and juniors get away from imposter syndome once they realize they do know what to do. It just takes time and repition to really get it
Absolutely! Repetition and experience are key. The more you practice, the more second nature it becomes. It’s also helpful to look back at past work and see how much progress you've made. It’s a great reminder that growth is happening even when it doesn’t feel like it. Appreciate your thoughts on this!
I have been around long enough to have known plenty of Senior Engineers and Developers, both good and bad. One time I was asked to attend this meeting where a developer was trying to dazzle with a Rube-Goldberg of something that was built into the operating system. When I asked why he was doing it, he acted really snotty and behaved as though I was the one that did not know anything. When I pointed out the information he was unaware of, he complained to my manager and made sure that I never attended another of their meetings. What I learned is that no matter how new you think a developer is, he may know something that you do not.
Also, in 2003 I was probably the first to use multithreading for ASP Custom State Management. Being able to figure out how to do something is far more useful than being able to copy someone else's example. AI is a tool to help you code faster, not better.
The problem the author is defining is not actually about the struggle to learn to code well, but instead the effort and results from in depth research. The harder one has to work to research a topic the better that topic is learned. This has been an axiom in education for many years and the evidence is there to support it.
As newer learning tools came online, to a degree they reached happy medium before AI was a thing, whereby one still had to do a bit of research without as much drudgery but a topic was still learned to a point where one could use the results efficiently in their coding tasks.
However, this rather good balance for technical professionals started to become undermined beginning with Google's increasingly poor research results as they pushed more political agendas into their algorithms. Good manuals began to disappear as many authors turned to online videos as substitutes (and by the way, make for very poor learning experiences), and AI was thrown into the mix with somewhat devastating results.
On the one hand, the new AI models, especially in the United States, were mostly built with a lot of garbage data, leading AI algorithms to produce increasingly inaccurate results (this is becoming well documented), while younger developers began using these tools to replace their own development efforts.
The result is that as new tools come online their is a corresponding lessening of intelligence since such tools are increasingly being used as substitutes for real learning.
This situation has been severely exacerbated in the US' educational institutions whereby political agendas have overwhelmed good teachers, instructors, and professors to the point where the US is no longer producing competent professional personnel who are competitive on the world stage.
These forces have been just as damaging to new professionals to our own field and until younger professionals turn back their own clocks to study their materials with a regard for the "old ways" of actual study, this decline will continue...
Totally agree. Would like to share a story, which I know from the HR screening. There was a question for a candidate on how to solve... The candidate didn't know the answer, so they answered, Oh, I will ask ChatGPT.
But the question arises: if AI can solve this, why do we even need to hire you?
I completely agree. It is an awesome tool to vastly improve the learning experience.
If you're trying to learn something, ChatGPT can be a great ally. No matter how simple or 'stupid' your questions feel, it will never judge you—even if you ask the same thing 100 times