The junior ticket was the training

The column said AI replaced the apprenticeship, not the engineer. This is the working I keep seeing in the rooms after that piece.

A junior ticket was a cheap way to be wrong in public, with someone still in the building who could catch it. That was the training. The output was incidental. When a model drafts the same ticket in twenty seconds, the output looks solved and the training has nowhere to live.

What organisations do next

They keep the senior hiring bar and stop hiring juniors, or they hire juniors and give them nothing that teaches. Then they wonder why the middle of the organisation is thin. It is thin because you removed the only path that made a middle.

I have led engineering organisations up to 120 people. I did not hire for a demo. I hired people who could write a constraint down, and I put them next to work that could still hurt a little when they got it wrong. If the agent now takes the hurt away, you have to put the hurt back somewhere else — a review that is real, a write they still own, a failure they have to undo.

What I will not do

I will not pretend a copilot is a manager of one. A person still has to say what good looks like, and they have to say it on work the junior actually touched. If the only thing the junior does is accept a draft, you are training a reviewer of one model, not an engineer.

Keep some of the first-year work on purpose. Make it smaller. Make the gate visible. Let them ship something a person can reject. That is the apprenticeship. The model can sit next to it. It cannot be it.