AI Is Making Developers Faster. But Is It Making Them Better Engineers?

I was reading a discussion among software engineers recently about AI-assisted coding.

What stood out was not the excitement around productivity.

It was the growing concern around understanding.

Many senior engineers were saying the same thing. Junior developers are now able to ship features very quickly using tools like Claude, Cursor, and Copilot. But when something breaks in production, they struggle to debug the issue or explain why the code was written a certain way.

The code works.
Until it doesn’t.

And that is where the real gap starts showing up.

Earlier, engineers learned through struggle.