# Will AI agents replace junior staff?

**The prior:** ~~AI agents will replace junior staff~~

## The short answer

Not the way people expect. Interns ask questions. Agents guess. A junior person who's unsure will usually say so. An agent that's unsure will often produce something confident, plausible and wrong. That means agents need more supervision than people assume, not less. Someone has to define the task clearly, decide what done looks like, and check the output, and that someone has to understand the work, which is exactly what junior roles teach. Agents can take on a lot of repetitive steps. They don't remove the need for people who know the work well enough to catch the mistakes. Budget for the review before you budget for the savings. Plan for the people who check the work to stay, and to get better at it. If the plan assumes agents need no supervision, the plan is the thing that's wrong.

## Outcome first
- Agents need supervision.
- Budget for the review.

By Eduardo Martínez, updated 2026-10-19. Source: https://rethinkyourpriors.com/priors/replace-junior-staff/

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Rethink your priors by Eduardo Martínez. AI implementation. Outcomes over tools. And everything else.
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