As a manager, I have started handing junior engineers work I would have reserved for seniors a few years ago. The problems are harder. The first pass is often better than it should be. The reason is not that we suddenly hire geniuses. They are using AI.
That is the job now. We can treat it as a threat to the profession, or we can treat it as a power tool and train people to use it without losing the craft.
A nail gun does not make a carpenter. A carpenter with a nail gun builds faster, and still has to know which wall is load-bearing. If the gun jams, they still need to know how to swing a hammer. That is the whole mentoring problem.
Train for questions, not trivia
The fear I hear from other leads is that we are raising prompt operators. If the model is down, can they still work? If we only measure whether the ticket closed, we will get exactly that.
So stop mentoring like a trivia contest. The useful skill is no longer reciting the algorithm. It is breaking a big problem into pieces, judging the suggestion the model just made, and knowing when the suggestion is politely wrong.
The mentor's job becomes: "Interesting. How do we know it's right? What does it break? Is there a simpler version?" You are not the fountain of facts. You are the person who will not let a confident answer pass for a true one.
Hire the person who takes the tool apart
Take-home projects are getting easier to fake. A polished solution is a weaker signal than it used to be.
Change the interview. Give them a messy legacy repo and an assistant. Watch how they navigate. What do they ask first? How do they verify the output? When the model wants to rewrite a working module, do they notice?
Hire curiosity. The long-term hire is the one who uses the nail gun all week and still wants to know what is inside it on Saturday.
What we do with the time we get back
If the model takes the repetitive assembly, the human work should move up a level: architecture, the experience, the ethics, the part that has to live with users. That only happens if we insist on it. Otherwise the extra speed just becomes more tickets.
I want artisans, not operators. Same wood. Better tools. Still responsible for the house.