We Broke the Ladder. Let's Ship a Patch?

The article was designed as an answer to a warning posted by @the_nortern_dev in The Junior Developer is Extinct (And we are creating a disaster) My initial reaction wasn't just agreement - it was discomfort. It comes too closely to the reality I observe in the industry. Because the thesis is not just largely correct, but it quietly being ignored, in a hope that the problem will "resolve itself" as the industry "adjusts" So what do we have: Yes, the "boring but formative" tasks are increasingly delegated to AI Yes, short-term velocity is winning over long-term capability building Yes, if we remove the apprenticeship layer entirely, the industry will feel that loss later. Those concerns aren't alarmist. They're merely statements of fact. And here's the uncomfortable truth: if we remove the grunt work, we remove the growth path. A Senior Developer isn't produced by reading documentation or prompting an LLM. A Senior Developer is forged by touching fragile systems, breaking things, debugg