Leanpub Book LAUNCH 🚀 Fix the Ladder: Growing Junior Engineers in the Age of AI by Giordano Scalzo
The complete illustrated edition is now available. Includes all 15 chapters, three appendices, and the full facilitator's pack. The pull request looks excellent. Ask the engineer why the code works, and the room goes quiet. AI has made it easier to produce good-looking software before y...
Welcome to the Leanpub Launch video for Fix the Ladder: Growing Junior Engineers in the Age of AI by Giordano Scalzo!
About the Book
The complete illustrated edition is now available. Includes all 15 chapters, three appendices, and the full facilitator's pack.
The pull request looks excellent. Ask the engineer why the code works, and the room goes quiet.
AI has made it easier to produce good-looking software before you understand the decisions inside it. Meanwhile, the same productivity gains make cutting junior hiring look sensible. Engineering leaders have two problems to solve: how people learn, and whether they get a chance to start.
Fix the Ladder is for engineering managers and CTOs who want AI's productivity benefits and a team that can take responsibility for what it ships.
Giordano Scalzo draws on three decades in software and a mentoring course refined over several rounds with working engineers. He shares the exercises that helped, the sessions that went wrong, and the questions he is still working through.
The method gives engineers regular practice in thinking before prompting, recognising complexity, explaining generated code, testing its failure modes, and deciding what to accept or change. It applies to anyone reviewing code they did not write, including experienced engineers learning to work with AI.
You will find:
- A six-session course you can adapt to your team's real code, with AI-off and AI-only exercises.
- An exercise catalog organised around the difficulties you see in reviews, with concrete actions and links between related exercises.
- A facilitator's pack with session plans, prompts, decision logs, and reusable templates.
- A business case for junior hiring and protected mentoring time, with evidence, sources, and the limits of each claim.
- A letter to share with your engineers, plus 39 explanatory diagrams and 15 sketch-style chapter illustrations.
The aim is to use AI deliberately while giving engineers room to develop judgement. That takes a leader willing to protect learning time, fund entry-level opportunities, and measure more than this week's output.
What are you doing this week to grow the people your team will depend on in ten years?
About the Author
Giordano Scalzo is a London-based AI engineering lead, author, and speaker with decades of experience building software and growing teams. His work spans mobile products used by millions, consumer apps, and hands-on experiments with coding agents.
He focuses on practical AI adoption: helping teams define useful work for agents, check the results, and develop the engineering judgement to own what they ship. He is especially interested in mentoring and how engineers keep learning as AI changes their work.
He has written six books on Swift, SwiftUI, and software development, and has spoken at NSLondon and Londroid. His current book, Fix the Ladder: Growing Junior Engineers in the Age of AI, explores how engineering managers and CTOs can adopt AI while growing the next generation of engineers.
Find his writing, projects, and talk recordings at https://gioscalzo.com/
