| By: Abdulmuizz Olanrewaju

Africa’s technology companies risk producing developers who can ship software faster than ever while understanding less of what they place in production.

A junior developer can now ask a coding agent to inspect an unfamiliar repository, create an interface, connect APIs, build services, write tests and correct errors until the application runs.

Within hours, they can produce work that resembles the output of someone with years of experience, even when they cannot explain the design choices, identify the risks or repair the system without returning to the same machine.

The code may work, but the competence on display may not belong to the person accepting responsibility for it. I call this borrowed competence: access to the output of experience without passing through the intellectual process that makes experience dependable.

It remains hidden while tests pass, then becomes expensive when traffic rises, or an adversarial user finds the assumption that both developer and agent missed.

This matters because today’s junior developers will become tomorrow’s founders, engineering leaders and architects, while their products will shape payments, healthcare, identity, logistics and public services.

If the sector weakens the route through which developers acquire judgment, it will eventually build systems on knowledge nobody inside the company fully owns.

Gwen Davis, writing for GitHub, argues that junior developers should use AI to learn unfamiliar concepts, question generated code and contribute earlier, while warning that AI works better for learning when developers are not under pressure to ship.

I agree that rejecting coding agents would prepare people for a profession that no longer exists. As a full-stack developer working across front-end systems, back-end…