AI and Hard Skills - Unsolicited Advice for Junior Developers

Don’t bother becoming an expert. Hand the heavy lifting to AI and learn to prompt engineer.

This could be relevant advice for someone like me, someone with 20 years of experience in tech as a software engineer and leader. But I am in a unique cohort of tech workers who developed skills in tandem with major technology advancements. I had the unique opportunity to learn in a throttled way over time, as each technology evolved. This allowed me to ride the excitement wave of each new iteration touted as the latest and greatest. This theme has repeated itself in other areas of life as well. You see, I am Gen-X, and the only constant for a Gen-Xer is change. I have learned to adapt over and over through the years.

So you are thinking about becoming a software engineer or are a junior developer navigating the current state of tech. What should you do? Does the same advice apply to you that might be perfect for me? I keep hearing that you, the junior developer, are going extinct. That might actually be the case if you don’t get serious about developing a core foundation of hard skills.

AI isn’t the problem. It is extremely capable of writing code and can really build some amazing things. As systems get larger and more complex, AI will most certainly lose context of the larger system and can easily get stuck bouncing around in the slop. These are all well-known limitations of AI and will certainly improve over time, but that puts you, the new developer, in a difficult situation.

If you rely entirely on AI, your growth ceiling becomes whatever the current LLM context can handle. Your leverage is capped and your value as an engineer is tightly coupled to your reliance on AI.

Without an understanding of the fundamentals, you will never really be “in charge” of what is going on. You’ll be in the passenger seat suggesting where to go or asking, “Where are we going?” You don’t want that. As a developer, you won’t know when AI gets it wrong, especially as more complexity is introduced.

Don’t let that happen.

Be in the driver’s seat.

To be a driver, you need to know where you are going and have the technical acumen to drive. The only way to do that is with time and effort. Focus on building skills. It requires deep work. Go deep.

So here is what you should start doing now:

Turn AI off regularly. Build things from scratch. Struggle a little. Learn why the code works. Read the docs. Develop your craft.

Once you have solid hard skills, AI will become a force multiplier - not a substitute for competence.