Education · 2026-11-06

AI may make it harder for junior developers to grow their careers: what an AWS expert advises

Amazon Web Services expert Darko Mesaroš explains why relying too much on AI can keep junior programmers from gaining experience, and what he advises instead.

✨ Why this is a problem

Junior developers are beginners in programming, while senior developers are experienced specialists. Moving between these levels usually takes years of practice. Today, AI models, including large language models (LLMs), handle many simple programming tasks. As a result, newcomers risk not gaining the experience they need.

According to Darko Mesaroš, Distinguished Developer Advocate at Amazon Web Services (AWS), the biggest danger is when a junior developer simply takes code from an LLM and never tries to understand how it works. At the same time, employers' requirements for junior specialists have risen significantly over the past five years, and getting a first job is harder than before.

📌 What the expert advises

There is no ready-made solution to this problem yet. Mesaroš sees one possible path in having beginners work alongside experienced engineers, learning from their knowledge and from their colleagues' mistakes.

For newcomers themselves, the expert advises actively using AI for learning, experimenting with code, and independently finding and fixing errors. In his view, this is how real experience is built.

🔹 A question asked at interviews

Mesaroš said that in his interviews at Amazon he asks candidates the same question: what did you break last time? If a person says they have never broken anything, he sees that as a problem. The reason is simple: you learn for real when something goes wrong and you fix it yourself.

So, according to the expert, beginners should not only master AI tools but also learn to solve technical problems on their own and critically check the code that AI generates.

Sources: 🔗 DOU/dev.ua