I’ve been an Engineering Manager at Manifesto for a while now, but I still remember exactly what it felt like to be a junior. Stressed. Stuck. Too embarrassed to interrupt a senior who was already drowning in their own deadlines. Working evenings and weekends just to keep up.
AI wasn’t around back then. But I know myself well enough to say, if it had been, I would have used it. And I probably would have used it wrong.
That’s the problem nobody is talking about honestly enough.
The engineers AI accelerates most aren’t the ones you’d expect
Watching AI roll out across my team taught me something I didn’t expect. The engineers who benefit most aren’t the ones who write the best prompts. They’re the ones with the deepest understanding of code and system architecture. Context is everything. Without it, AI gives you an answer you can’t evaluate, can’t defend, and honestly can’t learn from.
Give a junior engineer uncritical access to AI too early and two things tend to happen. They make mistakes they don’t fully understand. And slowly, almost without noticing, they stop learning, because the tool is doing the thinking for them.
So should we just ban it?
My first instinct was yes. Build the foundations first, earn the tools later.
Then I remembered that junior working weekends. If someone had told me AI was off limits, I know exactly what I’d have done with that information when under serious pressure.
Banning doesn’t work. But throwing open the doors without any thought doesn’t either. I sat with that feeling for a while before I landed somewhere more useful.
An alternative approach
What if AI could behave more like a mentor than a search engine?
Think about what it means to have a senior engineer sitting beside you, not doing the work for you, but giving you their complete, undivided attention. Asking questions, pushing back on your assumptions and helping you reason through the problem yourself. Someone who knows the actual code in front of you, not some abstract tutorial three versions out of date.
That’s what AI can be for junior engineers. But it doesn’t get there by default.
Introducing Sensei
Sensei is a coaching and mentoring tool for junior engineers, built on Claude. It asks questions rather than giving answers. It notices when you’re genuinely stuck and shifts into teaching mode. It reviews your code to build your judgement, not just fix your mistakes. And it builds a learning profile over time, so every session picks up where you left off.
The measure of success isn’t how fast it solves your problems. It’s whether you need it less six months from now.
To every junior engineer out there
You have a place in this industry. AI isn’t here to replace you, but it will widen the gap between engineers who understand what they’re doing and those who don’t. Sensei is built to make sure you end up on the right side of that gap.
Give it a try. I’d genuinely love to hear what you think:
Sensei engineering coaching tool