Your Junior Engineers Are Getting Faster but Are They Getting Better?
LeadDev, Thursday, October 8th, 2026
An engineering leader found AI tools let juniors ship 14 features yet build no mental models, and redesigned onboarding.
After six months of mandatory AI coding tools, Garima Agarwal's team had better velocity and cycle time, but junior engineers couldn't explain how the services they had shipped features against actually worked.
The gap surfaced when a junior engineer pulled into a race-condition incident had no idea where to start in a service he had changed two months earlier, because AI had removed the productive struggle that builds intuition.
Rather than restricting AI, the team spent six months redesigning onboarding to rebuild understanding, and the author describes what changed and what it cost.