The Fast Junior Engineer
Part I — The Shift
The mental model that makes everything else work: treat the agent as a fast junior engineer with sharp limits.
Draft stub — full lesson content will come from the verified book chapter (v2 wave).
Planned coverage:
- Capabilities and failure modes: where agents excel, where they quietly fail
- The new junior employee: very capable, fast learner, zero knowledge of your product, your customers, your goals — teaching it is your job
- The roadmap-of-understanding technique: repeatedly ask the agent to state what it understands about your business, then review and correct that statement to teach it
- Mind traps: the dopamine loops of endless creation, ideation, and over-engineering — why people don't notice until it costs them, and why AI makes every trap more dangerous by removing the friction that used to break the loop
- Trust boundaries: what you delegate, what you never delegate — direction-setting stays human
- The infinite improvement loop: why asking AI "what should we improve" leads to endless feature-adding in the wrong direction, and how to avoid it
- Confidence is not correctness: why fluent output needs senior review
- Calibrating over time: how your trust boundary should move with evidence
Ends with an action checklist.