Comment by borzi
6 hours ago
This is 100% an issue on the side of the senior developers. Imagine saying "these juniors are useless" because you are making them work in assembly, but C has just been released. You are giving them menial work that is no longer required to do by humans. Instead of giving them the task "update these email templates", the norm should be: "create this new service that automates an internal process". They will make mistakes and they will learn - but what they will be doing is going to be very useful and also give them chance to grow the necessary skills for this new era, with the supervision of a senior.
I think the issue is they used to make progress at a snails pace and you had plenty of teachable moments.
Now anybody can vibe code something that seems to work with a million landmines.
How can they develop the intuition around this given that they don't know what they don't know? How can we review it and help them get there?
Maybe we can figure it out, but I'm not sure it's easy or obvious.
By making them walk into the landmines and forcing them to fix it - that is how everyone became a good programmer. It's just the scope that has changed.