AI as a Tool, Not a Threat: Transforming Junior Roles Beyond "Vibe Coding"

AI is coming for your job -- at least the pre-AI expectation of what your job was. Embrace, Not EXTERMINATE, AI. Junior engineers should view AI as an accelerator for their career growth.

Embrace, Not EXTERMINATE

In the last 12 months, it seems like every other buzzword in the tech industry has been talking about “embracing AI” to write code, solve problems, answer questions, and do everything outside of playing with your cat. Noticeably, this has developed two different camps of early career software engineers: AI Maximalists and AI Doomsayers. The maximalists- aka the vibe coders- I’ve met have become experts at prompt engineering, while the doomsayers I’ve met have been exasperated every single time I suggest pair programming with ChatGPT.

I spend a lot of time mentoring junior engineers both professionally as well ...