For most of my career an engineer learned the craft by doing the small things first. Fix the typo in the error message, then the off-by-one, then the feature behind a flag, and somewhere in the second year the design of a whole module. AI coding tools now write a decent first draft of most of those small things, and I think that quietly removes the ladder a lot of us climbed.
I do not think the answer is to keep people away from the tools. It is to be deliberate about where the learning now happens.
What the small tasks were teaching
The typo fix was never about the typo. It taught how the code is organized, how a change gets reviewed, what the tests look like, and how it feels to ship. When a tool does the typing, the person still needs those lessons, and they are no longer free. A manager who wants a junior engineer to learn the codebase has to arrange it on purpose, with a walk through the system, a review that explains instead of approves, and a first change small enough to understand completely.
The skill that is left
What the tools do not supply is judgment, such as knowing that the generated code is correct for the wrong reading of the ticket, that it duplicates something two folders away, or that it will be slow at real data volumes. I think judgment grows from reading more code than you write, and from being wrong in public and finding out why. So the growth path I would design now has more reading, more review, and more explaining to others, and less emphasis on lines produced.
The strongest objection
Some people say juniors should simply learn the way everyone will work from now on, directing the tools, and that the old ladder is nostalgia. There is something to it. But directing a tool well requires knowing what good looks like, and I have not seen a way to know that without having built things by hand at least a few times. I would keep some work tool-free early on, the way a pilot still learns to fly without the autopilot.
Where I am unsure
I do not know yet how long the by-hand period should be, or whether it is a period at all rather than a proportion. I also do not know whether the people who start now will end up with a different kind of judgment that is as good as the old kind. Hiring conversations I hear now weigh autonomy and judgment above domain knowledge, and I think that is the right instinct even if nobody can measure it yet.
What I am sure of is that the ladder does not rebuild itself. If a team wants seniors in five years, someone has to decide how juniors learn now.
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