It won't make it impossible for junior engineers to learn.
It will simply reduce the amount of opportunities to learn (and not just for juniors), by virtue of companies' beancounters concluding "two for one" (several juniors) doesn't return the same as "buy one get one free" (existing staff + AI license).
I dread the day we all "learn from AI". The social interaction part of learning is just as important as the content of it, really, especially when you're young; none of that comes across yet in the pure "1:1 interaction" with AI.
I learnt programming on my own, without any social interaction involved. In fact, I loved programming because it does not involve any social interaction.
Programming has become more of a "social game" in the last 15 years or so. AI is a new superpower for people like me, bringing balance to the Force.
But it is not a social interaction. An LLM is a machine.
I think there is also a big difference between being forced to use an LLM in a certain way, and being able to completely design your interaction with the LLM yourself. The former I imagine can be indeed tedious and frustrating, the latter is just miraculous.
No one is forcing me to use LLMs, so that’s not it. The interaction is social in the sense that it is natural-language based and nondeterministic, and that LLMs exhibit a certain “character”. They have been trained to mimic certain kinds of human social interaction.
It probably also depends on what your favourite weapon of choice is. Mine was always written language, and code is just a particular manifestation of it.
It will simply reduce the amount of opportunities to learn (and not just for juniors), by virtue of companies' beancounters concluding "two for one" (several juniors) doesn't return the same as "buy one get one free" (existing staff + AI license).
I dread the day we all "learn from AI". The social interaction part of learning is just as important as the content of it, really, especially when you're young; none of that comes across yet in the pure "1:1 interaction" with AI.