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New Junior Developers Can’t Actually Code
Something’s been bugging me about how new devs and I need to talk about it. We’re at this weird inflection point in software development. Every junior dev I talk to has Copilot or Claude or GPT running 24/7. They’re shipping code faster than ever. But when I dig deeper into their understanding of what they’re shipping? That’s where things get concerning. Sure, the code works, but ask why it works that way instead of another way? Crickets. Ask about edge cases? Blank stares. The foundational knowledge that used to come from struggling through problems is just… missing. We’re trading deep understanding for quick fixes, and while it feels great in the moment, we’re going to pay for this later.
Back when “Claude” was not a chatbot but the man who invented the field of information entropy, there was a different way to debug programming problems. If they did, you’d find a detailed, thoughtful, (and often patronizing) answer from a wise greybeard on this site called “Stack Overflow”. If you stumbled upon a particularly difficult problem and didn’t find someone who had answered your question already, then tough luck.
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