The 'Seniority Cliff': skipping junior-level friction may hollow out engineering intuition
Jumpy-Increase9337 · reddit · 2026-09-18
A Reddit essay argues the overlooked bottleneck of AI development is the coming 'Seniority Cliff': entry-level repetitive work served as cognitive apprenticeship that built intuition through friction. As juniors skip that and only edit prompts, they lose the 'scar tissue' needed to catch plausible-but-wrong outputs before production. The author asks who will fill the gap in 5-10 years when today's senior engineers retire.
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