One of the recent graduates who is a part of our team was able to author a PR with 400 lines of code in just one afternoon. The changes were clean, all tests were passing and the PR was ready to be shipped. Then all of a sudden production had a memory leak. No dialog box, no autocompletion, just a graph going up and a very stressed junior.
The thing nobody wants to say out loud
A viral post on r/ExperiencedDevs about a coworker being fired for using AI instead of learning the code spawned massive arguments. It hit 1000+ comments discussing if AI is silently destroying the way juniors are meant to learn. Both sides are half right. And both sides are dodging the real problem. We didn't recruit engineers that are AI users. We recruited operators for a prompt and are surprised they can't think through a system without it.
The data caught up to the vibes
A study by Anthropic in January 2026 titled "How AI assistance impacts coding skills" found that AI users averaged 50% on comprehension quizzes. The hand-coding group averaged 67% (Cohen's d=0.738, p=0.01). The most significant difference was not about syntax or style, but rather related to debugging questions.🧠
