The Junior Developer CRISIS: How to Build a Team When AI Does the Entry-Level Work

A 30-year software engineering veteran argues that comparing LLMs/AI agents to junior developers is fundamentally wrong and does a disservice to both. Junior developers are curious, eager to learn, retain knowledge, and grow — they are humans at the 'conscious incompetence' stage. AI agents, by contrast, are transactional, stateless, lack memory across sessions, have no accountability, and don't care about your codebase or users. The author coins the analogy of 'Colin the contractor' — brilliant for narrow, well-defined tasks but unreliable and mercenary. Practical advice includes: give AI small, clearly articulated steps with frequent validation; give junior devs breakable toys, pair programming, and actionable feedback. The author warns that people equating the two either treat junior devs as robots or want to justify replacing them with AI — both problematic. The post ends with a tip to de-anthropomorphize AI interactions by configuring it to respond like a text-based adventure game.