How do you go from junior to staff engineer when AI writes the code?
Pair programming with the agent in the room
Seniors can still do pairing sessions with juniors, now with the agent in the room.
“In the pairing session, the earlier-career engineer should be the one driving. The agent can be set up to interrogate the junior rather than just answer them. None of you is manually writing code, but you’re still doing pair programming and mentoring. Even if it’s just a trivial bug fix, if you guide a junior through it, it forces them to do just that little bit of thinking.”
Adam says mentoring juniors today does not have to mean forcing them to write code manually. Seniors should teach them the process of agentic engineering, and that’s exactly what they should focus on during the pairing sessions. The habit he wants to be installed early is asking for options instead of answers.
“I aim to teach juniors to ask for options and think through them, even on small tasks. I ask them to explain what their input to the AI tool was that led to the code they got. But I’d also show them how I would have done the same thing.”
The pairing produces artifacts as it goes. “That’s where you get into conversations of, ‘This is why that wasn’t quite it for me,’ and if I see that that’s not baked into the repo, I’m going to add this into the ADR, into the design, into the instruction set. I’ll codify that so the junior gets it too, and they know why it exists, because they watched me go through it with the tool myself.”
That reshapes the code review instead of removing it. Making that work puts more on senior engineers, not less. “Senior engineers need to ensure that things like ADRs, or whatever system you use, are properly encapsulated in the repo for both the agents and the humans to consume.” His team also attaches the prompts to the pull request and has the agent summarize what it did against what the prompt asked.
Adam also teaches junior engineers how to bring in expert sources from outside into AI tools. He’ll point an agent at a book like Michael Feathers’ Working with Legacy Code as an example of what quality code looks like and have it work from the concepts directly.
