Team, let’s talk about the Copilot/ChatGPT line item in the budget. We see the 50% productivity gain on boilerplate code (Alenezi & Akour, 2025). But what’s the actual cost? Are we accidentally creating a generation of junior engineers who can’t step-debug a tough issue or write a secure library from first principles because the AI made the training wheels permanent? If the product is only as good as the person who validates the AI’s output, how do we teach them to be skeptics?
It’s a shiny hammer looking for a nail. I spend more time debugging the subtle security flaws Copilot introduces than if I just typed it myself. We’re outsourcing thinking, not just typing. Hard pass.
This is just the next leap. People said the same thing about high-level languages replacing assembly. It just raises the floor. Junior devs should be learning architecture, not boilerplate. Let the AI handle the CRUD, and we mentor on the complex systems.
We rolled it out for seniors only, explicitly to generate tests and documentation faster. Zero access for new hires for their first six months. They need to feel the pain of a memory leak to understand why they should care. You have to earn the assistant.