3 AImigo S1E5 Materials: A Junior Without Easy Tasks (Category #AI4SDLC)
The materials for the fifth episode of 3 AImigo, released on September 11, 2026, are ready. Evgeny Sergeev, Aleksey Litvinov, and I continued our discussion of hiring from a beginner’s perspective: if an agent can handle small fixes and features, where does someone who has yet to land a first engineering job get their practice?
We separated building products from getting paid for them. AI helps people build and launch a project sooner. But a working product alone guarantees neither income nor an understanding of how it works.
We discussed:
- Who will train the next generation of engineers. The industry needs future experienced specialists, while an individual company may prefer to equip the people who already know the job. We explored that conflict of incentives, with a caveat: successful internships for strong programming-contest participants cannot automatically serve as a model for every beginner. - A personal project as a way in. Follow a user’s problem through launch and maintenance. The stages after the first working version are especially revealing: bugs, changing requirements, and the need to understand what the agent built. - What to show an employer. Aleksey suggests discussing a project’s history: how the agents were organized, what instructions and automated checks were in place, and how failures were handled. That conversation reveals which decisions the person made and how they verified the result. - How to learn with AI. Engineering fundamentals and agent tools can be learned together. Technical books’ tables of contents help uncover gaps; questions, examples, and checks of understanding come next. Copying an unfamiliar term into AGENTS.md does not mean you understand it :) - How to design an internship. The beginner explains the task and acceptance criteria, defends the agent’s solution to a mentor, and understands release and rollback. I suggested starting with the company’s own process; mastering every methodology at once is unnecessary.
These are possible routes into the profession. Employers differ in how much they will invest in beginners, and mentorship, feedback, and a professional community remain important parts of learning.
Episode materials
- Episode page with discussion notes and timestamps - Video: YouTube, VK Video - Audio: Podster, Yandex Music, Apple Podcasts - Text: edited conversation recap
If you are starting your career or mentoring junior engineers, which tasks help people learn alongside an agent, and how do you check that they really understand the work?
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