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First, an acknowledgement.
It is a terrifying time to be a Junior/intern right now. After slinging hundreds of resumes through AI resume filters to companies that aren’t sure they really need Juniors anymore, and getting a job, the catch-22 pressure it intense:
1) Don’t use AI and do the work yourself to gain a deeper understanding of how to do anything, and you feel like you’re falling way behind in output.
2) Use AI to help produce output, and you feel like you’re not gaining an understanding of anything you’re doing
The social contract has always been that when you get an Intern/Junior engineer, there was less expectation of them. This was helpfully reinforced by the fact that they just couldn’t do that much yet.
That was fine. We threw them starter tasks. We offloaded tasks seniors didn’t want to do, with enough interesting work sprinkled in to keep the drudgery at bay. With enough care and time, a new senior engineer was built in the process.
What to do now that those are things people often consider agent tasks?
If we want to give juniors room to grow and develop into good senior engineers, some things matter more than ever now:
- Psychological Safety
We need to communicate early and often so that they understand it will take them longer to learn to do things “the manual way”, and have this feeling be supported through actions.
- Proactive Mentorship
It was previously that a major cause of interactions between a junior and their senior peers was the “how do I”. It was intimidating at first, but one often hit enough of a wall “there was no choice”. Hopefully the resultant interactions were positive enough, that a trust formed and seeking advice got more fluid.
If answers can now be retrieved from a terminal, this feedback loop is hard to bootstrap. It’s now imperative for a mentor to proactively reach out to the mentee on how they’re doing, if they’re stuck, and reinforce non-agent ways of addressing and solving problems.
- The Right Kind of AI Use.
It can be the most fantastic mentor, answering every question you’d have, showing step by step, and stepping back to probe you to try it yourself. But that’s not the default use. Output Styles are severely underrated, and fit exactly this mentality. It’s literally a switch from “do it for me” to “Explain this” to “Push me to do it and watch over me”. We will need more of this, and to provide guidance on how to do this.
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