The tasks that used to turn beginners into engineers are now being handed to machines first.
Think about how you actually learned. Not the courses. The grind. The small bug nobody senior wanted, the tedious form, the test suite you wrote because somebody had to, the config you fixed by trying things until it worked. That work was boring and badly paid and it was also the entire apprenticeship. You were learning to read errors, to navigate a codebase you did not write, to feel when something was off before you could explain why.
A great deal of that work is now generated in a few seconds.
That is genuinely good for shipping and genuinely bad for training, and our industry has not reckoned with the second half. If you are senior today, your judgment came from thousands of small repetitions you no longer remember doing. The people starting this year will not get those repetitions by default. They will get output to review, which is a far harder first task, because reviewing well requires precisely the instincts the repetitions used to build.
So training has to become deliberate now. That is part of your job, whether or not anyone names it.
Give newer people work that is slightly too hard, and let them sit with it before they reach for a tool. Ask them to walk you through generated code line by line, and be patient when they cannot, because that is the lesson. Let them debug something live instead of handing them the fix. When they bring you a solution, ask how they would know if it were wrong.
And say out loud that the struggle is the point. Otherwise it just looks like you are making them do things the slow way out of nostalgia.
Get this wrong and we end up with a generation who can produce a great deal and verify almost none of it, supervised by seniors who are retiring. That is not a prediction about technology. It is a prediction about what happens when you quietly stop training people and assume it will sort itself out.
You learned on work that is disappearing. Build the replacement for whoever comes after you.
– Asael Shinder
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