What's this about?
A junior engineer argues that constant delegation can remove the practice needed to become senior. The proposed countermeasures are questioning, deliberate review, learning team patterns and occasional AI-free implementation.
What exactly is senior judgment?
It is the ability to defend trade-offs, spot a wrong direction, connect a change to the wider system and recover when automation fails. It grows through decisions and consequences, not syntax memorisation alone.
What's the community saying?
HN 69 points and 57 comments.
- Several readers agreed that fundamentals make generated code auditable rather than magical.
- Others noted that abstractions have always removed low-level practice, so deliberate learning projects remain possible.
- Debate focused on whether reviewing AI work truly builds the same craft as creating and debugging a system oneself.