> This has traditionally been offloaded by having seniors do the hard thinking then distill it into a jira ticket which could be handed off to an engineer that'd actually write the code

I wish this were the extent of it nowadays. But for whatever reason, I've seen multiple really promising engineers get a hold of AI tools, and just outsource all of their thinking to it.

The self-infantalization is so bad that I was pair programming with a guy one day (partly to see how he was using AI) and watched him ask Claude if it makes sense to do X for every single decision.

I get using it as a form of linting... But you'll never learn how to be an independent developer if you constantly outsource your decision making. And it's disappointing too, because he was developing so rapidly as an engineer before Copilot came out.