The Junior Developer is Extinct (And we are creating a disaster)

The Junior Developer role is disappearing as AI handles entry-level tasks like unit tests and JSON schemas faster and cheaper than humans. This removes crucial learning opportunities where juniors gain codebase knowledge and debugging skills through grunt work. Seniors emerge from repeated production failures, not tutorials. Vibe coding with AI creates ununderstood codebases. Result: barbell workforce of experienced seniors using AI and prompt-only users lacking fundamentals. Solution: hire juniors to audit AI output via forensic coding.