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7 min readAI Dev Review

Should juniors use AI agents? An honest guide

AI agents make juniors faster and, sometimes, worse. Here's how to get the good half without the bad.

CareerBest Practices

The 'don't let juniors touch AI' crowd is wrong, but so is the 'let them autopilot' crowd. There's a middle path, and teams that find it produce faster and better engineers.

What agents give juniors

  • Faster ramp-up on unfamiliar codebases via explain-mode.
  • A patient reviewer at 2 AM who will explain the same concept three ways.
  • Working example scaffolds instead of blank-page paralysis.

What agents take away

Debugging muscle. Reading unfamiliar code. The frustration that turns into fluency. Every skill you skip once, you skip forever.

The rule we teach

Never accept code you can't explain line by line to a colleague. If you can't, close the diff and write it yourself.

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