Where Tomorrow’s Engineers Come From, Part 2: The Apprenticeship Problem
Above the RTL
SubscribeSign in
Where Tomorrow’s Engineers Come From, Part 2: The Apprenticeship Problem
Marco Brambilla<br>May 27, 2026
Share
AI can teach the fundamentals. It cannot give the skills, and the skill that matters most it cannot teach at all. A post on what does build judgment, and on the one disposition that decides whether someone is an engineer or an automaton.<br>Written with Claude Opus.<br>Thanks for reading Above the RTL! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.
Subscribe
Part 1 ended on a question. The roles AI displaces are the entry-level ones that used to be the path to the higher-complexity work. The destination still exists. The on-ramp is being demolished. So where do tomorrow’s senior engineers come from, if the activity that used to grow them is being absorbed by AI?<br>The reassuring answer, the one you hear at conferences, is that AI will teach the next generation. Give a junior engineer a tutor that is infinitely patient, available at every hour, and fluent in every topic, and you have solved the training problem. It is a comforting story. It is also half right, which is the most dangerous kind of story, because the half that is wrong is the half that matters.<br>What AI can teach, and what it cannot
AI can teach the fundamentals, and it is genuinely good at it. An engineer today can ask a frontier model about clock-domain crossing and get a clear, structured, patient explanation. They can ask follow-up questions, work scenarios, build vocabulary, and probe edge cases for as long as their curiosity holds. For canonical material that is written down somewhere, AI is a better tutor than most textbooks, because it is interactive and it adapts to the question. A junior engineer in 2026 has a better path to the fundamentals than any generation before them. That is real, and it should be said plainly before the rest of this post complicates it.<br>But teaching the fundamentals is not the same as giving someone the skills. Fundamentals are what you know. Skills are what you can do, and skills come from practice, not explanation. You do not learn to debug by reading about debugging. You learn it by sitting in front of something broken, forming a wrong theory, watching it fail, and forming a better one, a few hundred times, until the pattern recognition is wired in. No explanation shortcuts that. AI can narrate the process. It cannot do the reps for you, and the reps are the point.<br>And then there is the skill that matters most, the one this post is really about, and AI cannot teach it at all.<br>The olfact
Every senior engineer has it and almost none of them can fully explain it. It is the sense that something is wrong before you can say why.<br>Some years ago, as a director, I was reading a spec. There was a clause describing how a counter would wrap around. I read the clause, and before I had seen a single line of the engineer’s code, I knew they would implement it incorrectly. Not a guess. A certainty, arriving ahead of any evidence. I went and asked, and I was right: the engineer had read the same clause and understood it differently than the spec intended. The code was not written wrong. It was understood wrong, and I had known that would happen from the clause alone.<br>That is the olfact. Notice what it is not. It is not knowledge of counters, which any engineer has. It is not a careful reading of the code, because there was no code yet. It was a sense, built from having watched comprehension break in that exact shape many times before, that the clause as written would be read past. The wording left a gap, and I could feel the gap before anyone fell into it. Call it the olfact: the engineer’s sense of smell for the parts that do not add up.<br>The olfact is not knowledge. It is compiled experience. It is built from hundreds of cases, most of them never written down, many of them never even discussed, and it is the single thing that separates an engineer who can be trusted with sign-off from one who holds the title but not the judgment. It is also, precisely because it is compiled from undocumented experience, the thing no corpus contains and no model can be trained on.<br>There is a deeper reason AI cannot teach it, and it is worth being exact about. AI has to be driven. It does not decide what matters; it responds to what it is asked. It does not make the call the engineer is making, which means it cannot model the act of making that call, which means it cannot teach it. You cannot learn judgment from a thing that has none. The model can hold more facts than any human and still not have the one thing the junior most needs to acquire, because that thing was never a fact. It was a disposition.<br>How judgment actually gets built
Here is the part that is not gloomy.<br>The olfact cannot be taught, but it can be practiced, and the conditions for practicing it are better now than they have ever been. To see why, it...