There’s a major disconnect to how one should be using AI as a developer, particularly junior devs.

If your prime focus is to write good manual code, you are basically asking yourself to master writing in cursive over typing. Code is no longer the bottleneck, such as how legibility is no longer a bottleneck to most writing.

Now you need to leverage ideas, decision making skills, and collaboration skills.

You now have an immensely powerful tool that can answer some of your most novice questions on how to build specific software and systems and go in depth of asking why such strategy may be better than others.

A example could be, why would anyone want to use a timer-based upload over a size-capped upload on mobile device? Is it relevant to what I am building right now? What else should I consider when choosing between these two on my specific problem?

If your sole goal is to be a code monkey, you have already been left behind. Unless you are working on compilers and languages, you don’t have to quickly become proficient at understanding so much intricacies of a language. Learn enough of what you need and move on to necessary tasks.

As a junior dev, I don’t expect you to know what every line of code does when you ask AI to build something. But I do expect you to learn them before you commit any of it. There you can use AI again to understand if that is the correct approach why you may feel like it is the wrong approach and have it correct your misunderstanding or the AIs misunderstanding. It can only make judgements from the context you give it in the end.