“The resilience to avoid just copying your ticket into an AI prompt and then trying to check in that result. Like if that is all that you are doing, you can be replaced with a very small shell script. Like that is not a defensible advantage for you being on staff.”
The Pragmatic Engineer · Hands-On Engineering Podcasts · October 2026
Context
Asked what junior engineers should focus on now that AI writes code, Winters puts this first. He adds that AI isn't accountable, so engineers have to stand behind every pull request with their name on it.
Transcript
…about there being one project course in most degrees because you know what no team has ever looked like? A bunch of people with exactly the same level of background, right? Like it also gives the wrong taste about this is what teamwork is. Like, I'll take it. It's better than not doing it. But
…a workforce of just today with just the capability that we have, what do you think the fundamentals are that they should focus on? And what are the things that they should just rely on AI? There's always a question of like, should you just ask AI for this or should you learn the basics, right?
…everyone that's currently working has grown up in an era where there was a playbook. Like we know, at least in theory, the right way to do this. And there's no playbook right now, right? So we all have to get a little comfortable of not knowing the answer. And we certainly don't know the answer on what is still the basics. The things that I think that the juniors should be focusing on. One, the resilience to avoid just copying your ticket into an AI prompt and then trying to check in that result. Like if that is all that you are doing, you can be replaced with a very small shell script. Like that is not a defensible advantage for you being on staff. I think it's really important to use AI to better yourself and to widen your inputs, but not to immediately produce all of your outputs. There's a metaphor that I really liked from about a year ago at a think tank. We called it Andrew's Axe. And it's, if I go chop down a tree with an axe, I do not say that it was the axe that chopped down the tree. It's me that chopped down the tree. The AI, as…
And they actually have the autonomy and the drive to use this. Right.
And the, the, and the metacognitive resources to avoid that, like, I'm just going to copy and paste, right? The very worst students are somewhat better because they used to not be able to do anything, but now they can produce slop.
Yeah, they're just so on slop, yeah, which is a bit harder to detect, but I get what you're going.
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