For the past year or two, a certain take has been making the rounds in engineering circles: we don’t need junior developers anymore.
If AI can write the code, why train someone when the model can just do it?
Rob Zuber has heard this take. He thinks it’s wrong, but not in the hand-wavy “humans will always matter” sense. He thinks it’s wrong because it misidentifies what the job actually is, and therefore misidentifies what we’d be losing.
In this episode of Confident Commit, Rob sat down with two colleagues from CircleCI’s software factory team: Michael Webster, a software engineer with more than a decade in the industry, and Hanabel Mengistu, who joined CircleCI less than a year ago straight out of college. The result is one of the more honest conversations about the current state of software development: what experienced engineers are struggling to let go of, what new engineers are struggling to find, and where those two things collide.
1. The tools changed faster than the job descriptions did
2025 brought a lot of change, fast.
Webster framed the inflection point precisely: “Around the end of last year, we kinda had that Sonnet 4 / Opus 4 moment where it’s like, hey, something’s happened with these models. They’re able to do a lot more.”
The instinct, for a team that wanted to push hard on AI-assisted development, was to try running multiple agents in parallel and see what broke. The answer came fast.
“I think within the first forty-five minutes to an hour of starting, a lot of our instincts immediately started breaking down. The merge conflicts, the trying to stack them, the manual review overhead. Sub two hours, we were like, yeah, we’re gonna have to figure some things out here. Code generation time outpacing CI build times, all of that was pretty eye-opening.”
Michael Webster, Principal Engineer, CircleCI
The problem wasn’t the AI. The problem was that the existing process, designed around the constraint of human coding speed, was suddenly the wrong process.
Rob’s framing: “We fundamentally changed our constraints. But as humans, we’re not good at massive leaps in approach. So we’re clinging to the processes that we have and trying to tweak them with this fundamentally new toolkit instead of asking: what was it we were trying to do, exactly?”
2. What experienced engineers are actually clinging to (and why it’s hard)
Webster put something into words that most senior engineers are circling around but haven’t quite said directly:
“What if the stuff that I like doing is the bottleneck? What if the stuff that has saved me production incidents and helped me build a career, what if that is now the bottleneck? That’s a really challenging thing to work through.”
Michael Webster, Principal Engineer, CircleCI
If your expertise is in a thing that’s now being commoditized, the rational move (reprioritize, go further up the stack) is emotionally costly in a way that’s hard to explain to someone who hasn’t been through it.
Webster’s working theory: go back further than you think you need to. Sharpen the intuition, not the implementation. He cited Fred Brooks’ “No Silver Bullet” and the distinction between essential and incidental complexity. AI is handling a lot of the incidental complexity that accumulated over decades. The essential complexity of building systems that solve real problems for real people has not gone anywhere.
“You’re just moving further up the stack,” Webster said, “and that’s a skill a lot of folks don’t have, because for a long time it was really hard to do those other things and now those things are easier.”
3. College prepared Hanabel for a job that barely exists anymore
Hanabel graduated about a year before joining CircleCI. She came up through a computer science program that treated AI as a form of academic dishonesty: sign at the bottom of every test saying you didn’t use it, even as everyone quietly used it.
The irony Rob raised: using AI would have been cheating. Using AI would have also prepared her for her actual job.
Like most fresh graduates, Hanabel found herself equipped with technical skills, but needing experience in everything around them.
“I feel like that’s me during all the meetings. I knew nothing about the process or the delivery side of things. I didn’t know what that would look like outside of college.”
Hanabel Mengistu, Software Engineer, CircleCI
Rob’s take is worth sitting with: “A lot of the day-to-day job is not actually about the structure of software. It’s: How do we decide what to work on? How do we communicate about what we’re working on? How do we decide the risk involved? How do we deal with breakage? That’s probably more than 50% of the job. And then we took the part we did focus on in school and said, don’t worry about that anymore.”
4. Juniors aren’t being mentored, and it’s showing up as loneliness
One of the quieter observations in this episode: junior engineers are feeling isolated, and it’s not entirely their fault or anyone else’s fault specifically. The mentorship pipeline has a structural problem.
Hanabel described what she’s hearing from peers:
“A lot of my friends that are in the industry feel a little bit alone. People aren’t mentoring other juniors anymore because it’s something AI can do. Not really, but for small questions, you can just ask Claude. And asking AI is not always the most valuable way to learn.”
Hanabel Mengistu, Software Engineer, CircleCI
The deeper issue Rob named is a two-sided dynamic: senior engineers assume juniors can just ask the model, so they stop offering; junior engineers sense they shouldn’t bother asking, so they stop reaching out. But the value a good mentor provides isn’t just the answer to the question. It’s the context around the question, the adjacent things worth knowing, and the pattern recognition that says “you’re asking about X because you’re missing Y.”
5. The great leveling might actually help juniors more than it hurts them
The most optimistic thread in this conversation came from an unexpected place. Hanabel pushed back, gently, on the framing that the current moment is particularly hard for new engineers. Her read: it might actually be easier in one specific way.
“I feel like it’s comforting. It’s nice to be able to figure stuff out with other people and not feel like I’m the worst. I’ve been able to contribute so quickly. I wouldn’t be able to do all the things I’m contributing to if it weren’t for that.”
Hanabel Mengistu, Software Engineer, CircleCI
Claude Code went GA in June 2025. ChatGPT went GA in November 2022. Nobody has ten years of experience in any of this.
The experience gap that normally takes years to cross hasn’t had time to form in the places that matter most for this transition. For junior developers, this means that the playing field has flattened.
A curious generalist with no bad habits to break might actually have an edge over a deeply experienced engineer who has spent a decade optimizing for a set of constraints that no longer apply.
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