Seniors deflect onboarding questions to 'ask AI,' breaking the mentorship that juniors need to understand the codebase

Summary

In AI-forward teams, new hires asking genuine questions about the codebase, architecture rationale, or design tradeoffs are dismissed with 'Have you asked AI?' or 'Worthwhile asking Claude.' This feels dismissive, condescending, and unhelpful, and it blocks the exact knowledge transfer new engineers need to ramp up and to build personal connection in remote teams. Seniors burn out answering repeated questions (or avoid them entirely by deflecting), so institutional knowledge never compounds, and juniors are left to trust an AI's opaque understanding of a codebase they never actually learn. No tool captures senior reasoning and turns it into reusable, Socratic guidance that both relieves seniors and actually builds the junior's understanding — so the mentorship gap remains completely unsolved.