Learning Growing

I had a very interesting and illuminating experience recently. I worked side by side with two different developers on an AI coding tool. I had expressed interest in learning how the tool works and how they worked with it. We will call the developers A and B as this was much like and A/B test for me. A is a senior developer and has about ten years of post-college experience. He was tentative about using AI tools and has warmed up to it more recently. His reticence was evident in how he worked with the tool. He did most of the coding that involved creativity and thinking. All his testing is automated using the tool and he delegates mundane coding to it. A is very anal about distribution of work between him and the tool, making sure he is fully in control. He acknowledges it helps him but is determined not to become over-reliant. 

B is two years out of college and came into the workforce along with ChatGPT. His ways of working with the same tool are remarkably different. He expressed concern that using it is eroding foundational skills and a chance of deep understanding of programming. The last time he felt like he was in charge was in junior year of college. He said AI tools for coding encourage surface-level learning, making it easy to ship code without truly grasping how or why it works. The loss of repetition and struggle that used to be essential for building muscle memory and mastery in software development is a huge problem. B believes he will soon turn into one of those developers who can’t debug, explain, or adapt their code without AI assistance. He truly wants to be better than that but the community-driven learning platforms like Stack Overflow are not what they used to be. He has been coding since middle-school so he has observed the decline. B sees opportunities for mentorship and critical thinking disappearing for early career developers like him. He'd love to be like A but does not see the once direct path to getting there anymore.