Daniel explaining how AI is enabling shallow competence among the junior developers, as AI tells them what to do and but not what not to do.
So I got this comment on my last video and it genuinely stopped me in my tracks. It was from @Thiccolo and it reads:
“For someone like you, who likely has years of experience without LLMs, your brain totally understands good code/bad code, good architecture, and just general intuition around code and systems. LLMs must be an absolute gamechanger. But for someone like me who is starting out in this field, how am I supposed to build the years of experience and intuition that comes from manually writing code and building systems when companies are expecting AI to be used from here on out?”
The number of upvotes this got told me everything. A lot of you are feeling this exact thing and not really talking about it. So let’s talk about it.
Here’s the real problem. AI is making it really easy to build what I’d call shallow competence. You’re shipping fast, your manager’s happy, things look good on paper. But the moment someone in a code review asks you “hey why did you go with this approach?” and you freeze. Because honestly? You don’t know. The AI gave it to you and you just ran with it. Does this sound familiar?
That’s a problem. And it’s going to catch up with you.
To be clear, the reason experienced developers are valuable isn’t because we write code faster than you. It’s because we’ve spent years learning what not to do. We’ve made terrible architectural decisions and had to live with them. We’ve been paged at 2am because of something we shipped that seemed totally fine. That failure pattern recognition is what companies are actually paying for. And right now, a lot of junior devs are accidentally skipping all of that.
When I was learning, and I know this is going to sound like “back in my day” type stuff, struggle was just a given. You had a bug, you read the stack trace, you traced through the code, you dug through the logs. That was just the job. Nobody was handing you answers. And as frustrating as that was, it’s exactly how I built the intuition I still rely on today.
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