A Cautionary Tale of Junior Developer Steve And His AI Companion

He just landed his first junior software role. He’s 22. He’s excited but nervous. He wants to do well and he doesn’t want to disappoint. His Boss approaches him and asks

Boss: “Hey Steve, you know Rust right? It was on your CV”

Steve has only ever written a little bit of Rust. He used AI to write some small Rust scripts when he was at university. Steve exaggerated somewhat on his CV in order to get the position. Competition is tough after all.

Steve: “Errr yeah, a little bit. Why?”

Boss: “I need you to rewrite one of our internal tools. It’s a Markdown to HTML compiler. We need it rewritten in Rust so that it’s FASTER!”

Steve: “Ok sure… I’ll get onto that straight away”

“This sounds quite simple” thought Steve. He can make great haste and progress using his ever reliable AI companion. It is his light in the coding darkness.

Steve trusts his AI companion wholeheartedly. It always shows him the correct path amongst the myriad of potential wrong turns and painful pitfalls that code can present.

He starts to prompt away in his beloved Cursor IDE.

Before he knows it, he has produced a working app. Steve is happy. He shows it straight to his boss circumnavigating the senior members of the team. He doesn’t want them thinking he doesn’t know what he’s doing and AI is just as helpful.

His boss is pleased and heaps praise on him. Steve’s colleagues give him a weary but respectful nod of appreciation.

“This punch tastes good!” thinks Steve.

Steve doesn’t know about Clean code. Steve doesn’t know any typical Rust patterns. Steve doesn’t know how to test an app in Rust.

“Who cares” thinks Steve, “The app is working and that’s the main thing.”

Steve’s boss asks for Steve to convert another simple app. Once again Steve goes to his ever reliable AI companion and asks it to do the job. Once again his companion complies and produces a working app.

Steve starts whispering to himself that “Rust isn’t so hard” and “I can write Rust” and before he knows his confidence is slowly but steadily growing and there is even a little extra strut in his step.

But software has a way of humbling even the greatest of developers.

His Boss has grown confident in Steve, he starts to believe he has found a diamond in the rough. His Boss decides it’s time for Steve to join the big leagues.

There is an ongoing problem with an important production app which happens to be written in Rust. The Boss asks Steve to take a look. There is an investor call early next week and its imperative their flagship product is firing on all cylinders.

Steve goes back once again to his AI companion — always ready, never sleeping, never idle — and ask once more for it to assist him on his mission. The new Opus 4.5 model is out from Anthropic and this model is so good it’s apparently a “watershed moment”. According to Twitter anyway.

This project is bigger than anything Steve has worked on before. The code is older too and it already has quite a few users. However, Steve is sure his trusted companion will not let him down.

This time though, some cracks appear. Small at first and Steve is sure his trusted companion has his back, it will not flee at the first signs of trouble. His companion seems to be struggling though. It’s doing an awful lot of “thinking”.

He waits patiently noticing he is holding his breath whilst his companion does some more “thinking”… “I see the issue!” it states and Steve releases his breath believing the worst is over.

But something is wrong. The original crack has been covered but several more have appeared elsewhere. This can’t be right? He makes appeals to his companion and again it assures him they “know the issue”. “Then SOLVE the issue!!” he types. He has never spoken to his companion this way before. A dark thought starts to enter Steve’s mind.

“Does it really know what it is doing?”

Further hours are spent on this and Steve works long into the night, token usage stacking up, and still the finish is not in sight. His companion is talking about things Steve has never heard of. “Borrow checker” and “lifetimes”. “What?!” He’s really sweating now and whatever prompt he tries using it just seems to make the tangle worse.

Steve takes a step back. He faces his conscience in the quiet that surrounds him. It’s time to be totally honest.

Steve: “I don’t know Rust”

Steve: “I wouldn’t be able to code hardly anything without my companion”

Steve: “I am an imposter”

The work cannot be done in time. The investors are not happy and Steve’s boss feels very let down. Fortunately for Steve, when his boss finds out the truth he isn’t fired but rather assigned a Senior developer in the team as his mentor. Steve is lucky.

Afterword

I see many well respected names in the industry singing praises for LLMs and AI at the moment. I fear this is extremely short sighted. We are creating a perfect environment for short term productivity gains but over the long run we may lose much. Deep knowledge, true innovation and the next generation of talented developers.

One cannot learn deeply using AI alone. When using AI, the developer is in the driving seat and if the driver doesn’t know the terrain it doesn’t matter how good the car is, they will still get lost.

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