There's a post floating around dev forums from a junior engineer that stopped me cold. The essence of it was: “I can sense myself turning into an imbecile.”

Not burnout. Not imposter syndrome. Something new. A slow, creeping sense that the tools doing the work for them are hollowing out the skills they never got to build.

That should scare the entire industry.

The Speed Trap

Copilot and Cursor adoption among junior engineers in 2025 is massive. Almost everyone coming up right now is using AI-assisted coding from day one. And on the surface, it looks like a miracle. Juniors are shipping faster than ever.

However, delivery is not learning. Fast learning is very similar to speed without understanding, simply heading towards a wall.

At the beginning of my coding journey I inevitably had to sit with bugs. An hour staring at a stack trace would lead me to grok something elemental about the system. That friction was the education. AI assistants remove the friction and the education with it.

Autocomplete Isn't Mentorship

Here's what I keep seeing play out. A junior dev gets stuck, tabs over to Copilot, accepts a suggestion, and moves on. The code functions as expected. The PR is merged. There is no inquiry about whether or not the dev could explain why it worked.

→ They learn to prompt, not to reason.
→ They learn to accept, not to evaluate.
→ They learn to ship, not to debug.

Studies and widespread anecdotal evidence are pointing the same direction: heavy AI dependency correlates with weaker skill retention. People who lean on autocomplete for everything struggle more when the autocomplete disappears. This isn't shocking. It's scary.

The junior who said "I felt myself becoming an idiot" was not dramatic. They were accurate about the feedback loop we're in, where output is rewarded and curiosity is punished. 🎯

The Industry's Blind Spot

Experienced engineers and engineering managers are excited about the increase in productivity. It's only natural. Juniors are closing tickets faster, asking fewer questions, and seemingly ramping up in record time.

But "ramping up" and "getting good" aren't the same thing. We're confusing onboarding speed with competence. And when those juniors hit a problem that Copilot can't pattern-match — a weird race condition, a subtle data corruption bug, an architecture decision that requires actual judgment — they're stuck.

Stuck not at “I need to Google this”. Stuck at “I don’t even know what question to ask”.

This gap is fundamentally different, and it actually grows the longer someone continues to exclusively code through AI suggestions.

This Isn't Anti-Tool. It's Anti-Autopilot.

I use Copilot. I use Cursor. I'm not a luddite yelling at clouds. These tools are genuinely powerful for experienced devs who already have mental models and can evaluate suggestions critically.

But for someone who's never built those mental models? The tool becomes a crutch before it becomes a superpower. 😬

→ Copilot is a force multiplier — but you can't multiply zero.
→ If you skip the struggle phase, you skip the part where intuition forms.
→ The best junior devs I've worked with deliberately turn AI off for learning tasks.

The final point is the most important. The ones who are going to thrive are the ones who treat AI like a power tool, not a brain replacement. They will utilize it only after they have grasped the problem, and not in place of grasping the problem.

What Actually Helps

If you're a junior dev reading this, I'm not telling you to delete Copilot. I'm telling you to build a practice around it.

→ Write the first draft yourself. Then compare it to what AI suggests. The delta is where learning lives.
→ Debug without AI once a week. Sit with the discomfort. That's the gym for your engineering brain.
→ Read the suggestion before you accept it. Every single time. If you can't explain it, you didn't learn it.

If you're a senior or a manager, stop measuring junior productivity by ticket throughput alone. Instead, request them to provide you with details on the code they’re working on. Collaborate with them. Notice if they're building judgment or just building features.

The Real Risk

The industry is not experiencing a shortage of junior developers. It's a shortage of thinking developers and it's gradually developing. And we are supporting this trend with $20/month subscriptions. 🔥

We are quickly educating a generation of engineers who are capable of writing code but lack the ability to think about systems. This is not an issue with the tools. It is an issue with leadership.

Now, over to you: Do you think that embracing A.I. in our daily lives could be reducing our ability to tackle complex problems without it? When was the last time you solved something hard, and what did you learn from the struggle?