My experience is that juniors have an easier time to ramp up, but never get better at proper engineering (analysis) and development processes (debug). They also struggle to read and review code.
I fear that unless you heavily invest in them and follow them, they might be condemned to have decades of junior experience.
I have the same experience.
In my view there's two parts to learning, creation and taste, and both need to be balanced to make progress. Creation is, in essence, the process of forming pathways that enable you to do things, developing taste is the process of pruning and refining pathways to doing things better.
You can't become a chef without cooking, and you can't become a great one without cultivating a taste (pun intended) for what works and what it means for something to be good.
From interactions with our interns and new-grads, they lack the taste, and rely too much on the AI for generation. The consequence is that when you have conversations with them, they straggle to understand the concepts and tools they are using because they lack the familiarity that comes with creation, and they lack the skills to refine the produced code into something good.
> but never get better at proper engineering (analysis) and development processes (debug). They also struggle to read and review code.
You can describe pre-ai developers and like that too. It's probably my biggest complaint about some of my Co workers