Coach an engineer who cannot debug without AI

Judgment callMedium20 minAnthropic and OpenAI style

Your task

A mid-level engineer on your team pastes every error into an AI assistant before reading it. They ship fine, but they told you they feel slower at thinking without it. Last Tuesday an outage involved an internal service the assistant knew nothing about, and they froze for 40 minutes while others traced it.

What practice do you suggest for when to ask the assistant first and when to think first? How do they decide in the moment?

It covers

  • Learning vs delegating
  • Skill atrophy