Juniors enter as AI-natives, seniors adapted mid-career. AI is not just changing how engineers code-it is reshaping who holds agency across work and professional growth. We contribute junior-senior accounts on their usage of agentic AI through a three-phase mixed-methods study: ACTA combined with a Delphi process with 5 seniors, an AI-assisted debugging task with 10 juniors, and blind reviews of junior prompt histories by 5 more seniors. We found that agency in software engineering is primarily constrained by organizational policies rather than individual preferences, with experienced developers maintaining control through detailed delegation while novices struggle between over-reliance and cautious avoidance. Seniors leverage pre-AI foundational instincts to steer modern tools and possess valuable perspectives for mentoring juniors in their early AI-encouraged career development. From synthesis of results, we suggest three practices that focus on preserving agency in software engineering for coding, learning, and mentorship, especially as AI grows increasingly autonomous.

翻译：初级工程师作为AI原生代进入行业，高级工程师则在职业生涯中期适应变革。AI不仅改变了工程师的编程方式——更重塑了工作与专业成长过程中自主权的归属格局。我们通过三阶段混合方法研究，呈现了初级与高级工程师关于代理型AI使用的实践报告：结合5名高级工程师的德尔菲流程开展ACTA分析、对10名初级工程师进行AI辅助调试任务，并由另外5名高级工程师对初级工程师的提示历史进行盲审。研究发现，软件工程中的自主权主要受组织政策而非个人偏好制约：经验丰富的开发者通过精细化任务委派保持掌控，而新手则在过度依赖与谨慎回避间挣扎。高级工程师凭借前AI时代的基础直觉驾驭现代工具，并在指导初级工程师早期AI赋能型职业发展方面具备宝贵视角。基于研究结果的整合，我们提出三项聚焦于维护软件工程中编码、学习与指导自主权的实践建议，这对AI日益自主化的趋势尤为重要。