Where newer developers get experience now

Linus Torvalds recently used an LLM while working on the Linux kernel. In his post about the patch series, he explained the earlier attempts at the problem, how his approach worked, and where the results had limits, including a benchmark speedup that real workloads won't match. Then he asked other developers for feedback. Read his post on the kernel mailing list.

It wasn't his first time. In his AudioNoise project he noted that AI helped him write a Python visualizer. Both times, what stood out wasn't the tool. It was the judgment around it: knowing what to ask for, checking what came back, explaining the trade-offs, and putting the result in front of other people.

So where does a newer developer get the experience to make those decisions?

The first rung of the ladder is missing

For a long time the answer was a junior job. You joined a team, picked up small tickets, had your pull requests picked apart by someone more experienced, and slowly learned how real software gets built and maintained.

That path is narrower now. Many teams hire fewer entry-level developers, and some expect AI tools to cover the work juniors used to do. The work hasn't gone away, though. Someone still has to understand the code, decide what is good enough, and follow through when a reviewer asks for changes. Those skills come from practice with feedback, and fewer people are getting that practice on the job.

AI makes this more urgent. It is easier than ever to produce code you don't fully understand. Without someone reviewing your work and asking why, it's hard to tell whether you're learning or just generating.

Experience comes from loops, not from one PR

You need to work on something real, explain your decisions, get feedback, and make changes. Then you do it again on the next feature, with a bit more understanding than you had before.

A single drive-by pull request rarely gives you that. You might fix a typo or a small bug, and then the conversation ends. Mentorship is what turns one contribution into a series of them, each one building on the last.

Why we're building Devprentice

Maintainers have projects they want to move forward. Developers want experience working with other people. Devprentice brings them together around a program in an existing open-source repository: several related issues and features, clear milestones, and a maintainer who guides and reviews the work.

• The code, pull requests, and reviews stay on GitHub, under the project's own rules.
• Contributors go through the whole process, revisions included, across more than one piece of work.
• Maintainers bring people into meaningful work on their backlog and build a relationship that lasts beyond one PR.
• A named maintainer decides whether the work meets the agreed criteria. AI can help along the way; it doesn't make that call.

Work experience anyone can check

When it's hard to get a first job, it's also hard to show what you can do. A résumé line says you know a framework. A public history of merged pull requests, review threads, and the changes you made in response shows how you actually work.

Because every program runs in a public repository, the evidence already exists on GitHub. At the end of a program, a Contribution Record connects the agreed milestones, the maintainer's feedback, your response, and the reviewed outcome, with links back to the real work. It stays private until you choose to share it, and anyone you share it with can follow those links and judge the work for themselves.

AI can be part of it

Each program states its own AI policy. Using AI isn't the problem. You still need to understand your work, explain it when asked, and follow through on the feedback. That's the experience a maintainer can help you build, and it's the experience teams are looking for.

Join us as a design partner

We're looking for open-source projects to join us as design partners and help shape Devprentice. If you have useful issues and features to work through and want to grow your contributor team, we'd love to work with you. We'll help with setup and onboarding too.