Take AI away from junior developers.
Because apparently progress — and access to better tools — is the real issue.
Why does half the internet suddenly sound like children arguing over who gets the toy?
There’s a growing narrative that juniors shouldn’t use AI “until they’ve learned the fundamentals.”
It’s usually framed as pedagogy.
We need to make sure they learn the proper way.
It’s interesting how often gatekeeping dresses up as educational philosophy.
The 24/7 Mentor We Pretend Doesn’t Exist
AI isn’t a cheat code.
It’s the first mentor that:
- never runs out of patience
- never says “just Google it”
- never makes you feel stupid
- never has to jump to the next meeting
It explains syntax.
It rewrites code.
It suggests alternatives.
It answers “why does this even work?” at 11:47 PM.
And it allows unlimited follow-up questions.
“Why this pattern?”
“What’s the tradeoff?”
“What happens if I change this?”
That’s not bypassing fundamentals.
That’s engaging with them.
A Small, Very Real Example
One of my juniors recently ran into a Python issue.
He doesn’t normally write Python. He assigned a string. Added a trailing comma.
value = "hello",Which silently turns it into a tuple. His code broke in strange ways. Nothing obvious. Just… wrong behavior. He was completely blocked. No idea what was happening.
I asked him one question: “Did you ask the AI?”
He hadn’t. He pasted the snippet in. The AI immediately pointed out:
- The trailing comma creates a tuple.
- Why Python treats it that way.
- How single-element tuples work.
- Why the type changed.
- What to fix.
Blocker gone. Now imagine the alternative approach:
“No. Don’t use AI. Figure it out the proper way by debuging a day.”
What would that have taught him? Not deeper fundamentals. Just slower frustration. Instead, he learned:
- A subtle language rule
- Why it behaves that way
- How to recognize it next time
That’s not dependency. That’s accelerated feedback.
“But They’ll Just Copy-Paste”
Yes. Some will.
But let’s not pretend that started with AI.
The ability to avoid thinking has always been available. The tool didn’t create that behavior. It just made it more visible. If someone wants to learn, AI is a microscope. If someone doesn’t, it’s a crutch. Banning the microscope doesn’t create curiosity.
Struggle Is Not the Same as Learning
There’s this persistent belief that suffering equals competence.
“I had to debug for three days.”
“I learned C from a 700-page book.”
“I didn’t have autocomplete.”
Okay?
But was the goal to understand — or to endure? Removing friction doesn’t remove fundamentals. If AI handles boilerplate and minor syntax traps, juniors can focus on:
- data flow
- architecture
- state management
- edge cases
- performance tradeoffs
You know, the actual fundamentals, not the comma.
What We Actually Pay Developers For
Nobody is paid to memorize syntax.
You’re paid to:
- understand systems and data
- reason about tradeoffs
- debug broken logic
- design maintainable solutions
- take responsibility when things fail
AI can generate code. It cannot own consequences. If a junior blindly trusts generated output, that’s not a tooling issue. That’s a mentoring and review issue. We don’t build responsible developers by hiding tools from them. We build them by reviewing decisions with them.
The Real Risk
Taking AI away from juniors doesn’t create stronger engineers. It creates slower ones. Meanwhile, the juniors who learn how to use AI responsibly will:
- iterate faster
- explore more alternatives
- see more patterns
- ask better questions
- get feedback instantly
Learning speed matters. And we just handed people a feedback engine.
Turning it off in the name of “proper learning” feels less like pedagogy — and more like nostalgia.
Don’t Ban the Mentor
We don’t remove IDEs so people learn how to count brackets manually.
We don’t unplug the internet to build character.
So why would we ban the most interactive learning tool we’ve ever had?
If the goal is to raise competent developers, the question isn’t:
“Should juniors use AI?”
It’s:
“Are we teaching them how to use it responsibly?”
Removing tools doesn’t create fundamentals. It just recreates 2008. And 2008 wasn’t better. It was just slower.