Exactly this. If a junior dev is never exposed to the task of reasoning about code themselves, they never will know what the difference between good and bad code is. Code based will be littered with code that doe the job functionally, but is not good code, and technical debt will accumulate. Surely this can't be good for the junior Devs or the code bases long term?
To be fair, most startups already trade "works today" for "easier to add stuff in the future", even before LLMs. I'm sure we'll see a much harder turn to the "works today" direction (which current vibe-coding epidemic already seem to signal we're in), until the effects of that turn really starts to be felt (maybe 1-3 years), then we'll finally start to steer to maintainable and simple software again.
I’m not so sure. In the short term, yes, we hear about disasters caused by developers choosing “works today” and the AI almost instantly making a mess…
But that’s the point. The feedback loop is faster; AI is much worse at coping with poor code than humans are, so you quickly learn to keep the codebase in top shape so the AI will keep working. Since you saved a lot of time while coding, you’re able to do that.
That doesn’t work for developers who don’t know what good code is, of course.
