Something I’ve been noticing recently while managing junior developers is how heavily many of them rely on AI tools. Don’t get me wrong — tools like Cursor, Copilot, and ChatGPT are incredibly useful and they absolutely increase productivity. But I’m seeing a pattern. Many freshers or developers with 1–2 years of experience can complete tasks quickly with AI assistance. They can generate features, refactor code, and even scaffold entire components. The problem starts when something small breaks. A simple bug that should take 5 minutes to debug manually sometimes becomes a long process because the developer immediately goes back to AI instead of stepping through the code, checking logs, or reasoning through the problem. It feels like they can build with AI , but struggle to debug without it . Historically, debugging was one of the most important developer skills — understanding how the system works, tracing the issue, and fixing it. So it makes me wonder: Are we unintentionally creating a generation of developers who can generate code quickly but don’t build the deep understanding needed to debug systems? Or is this just a normal transition period, and debugging itself will eventually become AI-assisted too? Curious what other engineers and managers are seeing. submitted by /u/IcyBottle1517
Originally posted by u/IcyBottle1517 on r/ArtificialInteligence