> and those tasks were never just tasks. They were the mechanism that built judgment, intuition, and the ability to supervise the systems we now delegate to AI.

Bullshit. The busywork wasn't being done by low level engineers to train them up, they were doing it because it needed doing, it was undesirable, and they were lowest on the totem pole.

Jobs are self training. Sure doing other jobs may give you some intuition that can be applied to new jobs. Manually writing code and fixing your human created mistakes obviously carries over for debugging AI written code. But people who start their careers with AI written code will also learn how to debug AI code. You don't learn how to architect a system by coding a system somebody else architected. At best you might pick up some common patterns by osmosis, but this often breeds worse engineers who do things as they have been done in the past without understanding why and without regard to how they really ought to be done. True understanding of why A was chosen in this case and B works better in another comes from actually doing the high level work.

Indeed, if AI usage is like any other tool that has come before it, those who grow up using it will be much more adept at utilizing it in practice than those who are adopting it now after spending a lifetime learning a different skillset. We don't exactly lament how much worse software engineers have gotten since they no longer learn how to sort their punch cards if they drop them.

Even if you are of the opinion that the tasks junior engineers do, which now AI can do, are fundamental to becoming competent at higher level skills, that's no problem. You can train people without them doing value-added work. Have engineers code the old fashioned way for training purposes. It's no different from doing math problems despite calculators existing. This is a problem only for extracting underpaid labor out of junior engineers with the lie that they are being paid in experience.