alt Hacker Newswhat is a larger issue? lacking domain knowledge? or lacking deeper understanding of years of shit in the codebase that seniors may have better understanding? where I work, there is no issue that it "too large" for a junior to take on, it is the only way that "junior" becomes "non-junior" - by doing, not by delegating to so-called seniors (I am one of them)
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Just curious, are you mostly FE? I could see this there (but there is still a lot of browser esoteria, etc)
Doing backend and large distributed systems it (seems to me), much deeper. Types of consistency and their tradeoffs in practice, details like implementing and correctly using lamport clocks, good API design, endless details about reworking, on and on.
And then for both, a learned sense of what approaches to system organization will work in the long run (how to avoid needing to stage a re-write every 5 years).
You can't give a junior tasks that require experience and nuance that have been acquired over years of development. If you babysit them, then perhaps but then what is the point? By it's nature "nuance" is something hard to describe concretely but as someone who has mentored a fair few juniors most of them don't have it. AI generally doesn't have it either. Juniors need tasks at the boundary of their capability, but not far beyond to be able to progress. Simply allowing them to make a mess of a difficult project is not a good way to get there.
There is such a thing as software engineering skill and it is not domain knowledge, nor knowledge of a specific codebase. It is good taste, an abstract ability to create/identify good solutions to a difficult problem.
Unnecessary complexity, completely arbitrary one off designs, over emphasis on one part of the behavior while ignoring others. Using design patterns where they shouldn't be used, code once and forget operations exist, using languages and framework that are familiar but unfit for that purpose. The list goes on and I see it happen all the time, AI only makes it worse because it tend to verify all of these with "You're absolutely correct!".
Good luck maintaining that.
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"Larger issue" is overall technical direction and architecture, making decisions that don't paint you into a corner, establishing maintainability as a practice, designing work around an organization's structure and habit and so on.
But these are the things people learn through experience and exposure, and I still think AI can help by at least condensing the numerous books out there around technology leadership into some useful summaries.