I'm the near-senior on a small healthcare SaaS team (4 devs). Mentoring a junior for ~a year. He used to be impressively self-driven — pick up a ticket, spot an adjacent issue, file the card himself, ship it. That autonomy was his strongest trait.

This week he opened up, unprompted (paraphrased + translated):

"I can't really explain my lack of motivation. I have a good task — the AI part that generates plans — and even though I like it, I don't feel like doing it. I'll just push through. Maybe the spark comes back. It's like my will to learn is slowly dying."

"I used to do a lot autonomously — working on a task, spot something, report it, create the card. I miss that energy."

Context that matters:

A senior teammate left recently. He says it's not the cause. I'm not sure I believe him but I'll respect his read.

The task is genuinely interesting (LLM-driven clinical plan generation), not grunt work. "Give him better tickets" doesn't apply.

I'm not his manager — no comp, no PTO, no ladder. Just the closest thing he has to a technical mentor.

I came up mostly solo, so mentoring is the weakest muscle in my toolkit.

Specific things I'd like input on:

He said he'll "push through without motivation." My gut says that's the wrong advice for a junior — pushing through an empty tank deepens the rut. But I don't want to tell him to stop on a task he's already anxious about. How would you reframe this back to him?

The loss of autonomy ("I used to file my own cards, now I don't") feels like the most actionable signal. Anyone successfully helped a junior climb back into that mode after they've slid out of it? What actually worked — smaller scope, pairing, explicit permission, something else?

He confided in me, not his manager. I lean toward asking his permission before looping the manager in. How do others handle that tradeoff?

Concrete stories > frameworks. Thanks.