This post is a counter-argument to The Death of the Junior Developer. Don’t get me wrong, that is a good piece and you should read it too, but here I’ll offer a different (and more encouraging) perspective on things.
A few months ago in We’ve Been Here Before, I explained why AI won’t take our jobs—just like every other technological shift we’ve survived. Actually, we’ve thrived. Today, I want to take that argument further: AI will supercharge Junior Developers’ growth in ways we’ve never seen before.
But before we begin, this post is NOT about where the market is going (I have no idea) or any predictions for 5 years from now (also no clue). This post is about the fact that—at least, it’s what I’ll try to convince you—there’s never been a better moment to be a Junior Developer.
Look, if there’s one thing I believe in, it’s the power of a fast feedback loop. Think about learning tennis: a coach watching your every move, correcting your grip, footwork, and follow-through. You improve exponentially faster than someone just hitting balls against a wall, right? That immediate feedback—knowing exactly what you did wrong and how to fix it—is the secret sauce of rapid improvement.
You don’t need to take my word for it. In The Talent Code, Daniel Coyle explains how “deep practice” relies on immediate, targeted feedback to accelerate mastery in everything from sports to music to academics. Programming is no different: the quicker you see the results of your decisions—and the more clearly you understand what to change—the faster you improve.
Want to see just how much feedback loops matter? Let me take you back to when I started, and you’ll see why I’m so excited about where we’re heading.
Almost 2 decades ago, and I’m an intern. I’m staring at my screen for hours because my stupid Java code won’t compile. The error message might as well be written in hieroglyphics. My options? Flip through my 800-page Java book (good luck finding anything), bug the Senior Dev who’s clearly annoyed by my “rookie questions,” or my personal favorite: random trial and error until something works. After three days, I finally figure out what that NullPointerException was all about. That experience was unfortunately very common back then. Junior Developers had a really freaking slow feedback loop.
Then Stack Overflow showed up. Total game-changer. Got a weird PostgreSQL error? Boom—someone in Berlin had the same issue last year, and someone else in Sydney posted the solution. If your problem was too specific, you could post it and go grab coffee. By the time you got back, some kind soul had probably solved it for you. What used to take days or weeks of stumbling in the dark now took hours.
But now, with AI? Imagine having a senior engineer paired with you every single minute of the day, ready to jump in with insights on syntax, architecture, and performance—plus detailed explanations of why one approach is better than another. It’s not just “Here’s the fix,” it’s “Here’s the reasoning.” Remember how you’d wrestle with a cryptic stack trace or wander through a maze of documentation? Now, AI can dissect it all in real time and serve up best practices, all while teaching you the theory behind them. Not sure about you, but I would’ve loved that when I was starting.
Now, in which of these era do you think junior developers can learn faster? The one where they spend days flipping through books, the one where they can find some help on Stack Overflow after a bit of digging, or this AI-powered era where feedback is instant, context-aware, and deeply educational and personalized? It’s not even close.
Multiply that effect across months of consistent coding, and suddenly the “Junior” who started with AI-driven feedback has the foundational knowledge and problem-solving skills that used to take years of late-night debugging sessions and production fires to accumulate. It’s not that they’re skipping steps—they’re simply getting there faster.
And here’s the ironic part: they won’t stay Junior for long.
Terrible Software 