Blog

We’re glad you’re here!

Breathe deeply, grab your preferred coffee mug, and look through our blog.

AI Won’t Replace You. Your Lack of Learning Will

Huong Doan

January 30, 2026

The Junior Developer You Never Hired

I use AI for coding (Claude) every single day, but I never let it think for me. Here’s the mental model that changed everything: AI is your junior developer. Not your senior. Not your tech lead. A junior who’s incredibly fast, endlessly eager, and will do exactly what you tell it — even when you’re completely wrong. That’s the trap nobody talks about.

Think about how a real team works. You have a tech lead or senior developer who sets the architecture, makes the hard decisions, and enforces coding conventions. Then you have junior developers who implement based on that guidance. The junior follows the structure. They don’t question the architecture — they execute within it. AI works exactly the same way.

It doesn’t push back on bad decisions. It doesn’t say “hey, this pattern will break in six months.” It doesn’t warn you that you’re creating a maintenance nightmare. It just implements. Fast. Confidently. Wrongly. I’ve watched developers hand over their thinking to AI. “The model is smarter than me,” they say. “Why should I intervene when it can write code faster and better?” Because it can’t think. It can only follow. Give it bad directions, and it will sprint confidently toward a disaster you won’t notice until it’s too late.

The Tech Debt Time Bomb

I’ve seen managers bet everything on AI replacing their engineering teams. “Why do we need so many developers when AI can write code?” they ask in planning meetings. Then reality hits.

The code works today. Ships on time. Passes the demo. Everyone celebrates the productivity gains. Six months later? The codebase is a disaster. No consistent patterns. Hardcoded values everywhere. Error handling exists in some places and vanishes in others. Dependencies that conflict. Security vulnerabilities that scanners miss but attackers won’t. This isn’t hypothetical — according to Forrester, 55% of companies now regret their AI-driven layoffs. They discovered what every experienced developer already knows: AI amplifies existing skill. It doesn’t replace the need for it.

Here’s what most people miss: AI makes things work, but it doesn’t make things better. It optimizes for “does this run?” not “will this scale?” It answers “can I ship today?” not “will we survive next year?”

That’s not intelligence. That’s autocomplete with confidence.

My rule is simple: I own the architecture, the decisions, and the direction. AI handles the implementation that I’ve already designed. When AI writes something, I don’t fully understand. I don’t ship it. Period. Because the moment you ship code you can’t explain is the moment you’ve lost control of your own project. We have a term for this: tech debt. And AI generates it at scale if you’re not paying attention.

Learning Is the Only Moat

You already know this, but don’t want to admit it: you still need to learn. The model can’t teach you what it doesn’t know. New frameworks are released after their training cutoff. Emerging patterns aren’t in its dataset. The bleeding edge of your industry exists only in documentation, conference talks, and hands-on experimentation. AI can summarize. It can explain concepts it was trained on. But it cannot discover. It cannot innovate. It cannot adapt to something genuinely new. That’s your job. That’s always been your job.

I see developers who’ve become so dependent on AI that without it, they freeze. They can’t debug without asking the model. They can’t architect without a generated template. They can’t write a function without autocomplete suggestions. If that’s you? We need to talk. Learning is slow. I get it. Sitting with documentation, building toy projects, breaking things, and fixing them — it’s frustrating. It’s inefficient. It doesn’t feel productive compared to prompting AI and watching code appear. But the experience you gain from learning stays with you forever. AI outputs are disposable. They solve today’s problem. Your knowledge compounds. It solves tomorrow’s problems too, and the ones after that.

The developers who will thrive aren’t the ones who prompt best. They’re the ones who understand deepest. So here’s my challenge: can you still build without AI? Not “would you prefer to” — can you? If the answer is no, it’s time to relearn. Don’t depend on the tool. Harness it. Learning is how you evolve. It’s the one advantage AI can never take from you — unless you stop doing it.

I’d love to hear your honest answer.