That time when you got to internalise through first hand experience what good & bad look like is when you built the skill/intuition that now differentiates competent LLM wielding devs from the vibers. The problem is that expectations of juniors are inevitably rising, and they don't have the experience or confidence (or motivation) to push back on the 'why don't you just AI' management narrative, so are by default turning to rolling the dice to meet those expectations. This is how we end up with a generation of devs that truly don't understand the technology they're deploying and imho this is the boringdystopia / skynet future that we all need to defend against.
I know it's probably been said a million times, but this kinda feels like global warming, in that it's a problem that we fundamentally will never be able to fix if we just continue to chase short term profit & infinite growth.
I would say that baptism by fire _is_ where the quality of an academic education comes from, historically at least. They are the same picture.
In my experience, target schools are the only universities now that can make their assignments too hard for AI.
When my university tried that, the assignments were too hard for students. So they gave up.
If you didn't have high information density in essays you were torn into. AI was a disadvantage due to verboseness.
Most people dropped the class and prof went on sabbatical.
Education and training and entry level work build judgement.
AI is either the next wheel or abysmal doom for future generations. I see both and neither at the same time.
In corporate environment where navigating processes, politics and other non-dev tasks takes significantly longer than actual coding, AI is just a bit better google search. And trust me, all these non-dev parts are still growing and growing fast. Its useful, but not elevating people beyond their true levels in any significant way (I guess we can agree ie nr of lines produced per day ain't a good idea, rather some Dilbert-esque comic for Friday afternoon).
> I'll usually turn off AI tools for a good chunk of the day just to make sure I don't get too rusty.