alt Hacker NewsI hope juniors will figure out how to use AI to do larger tasks that are still annoying for seniors to do, while seniors take on larger tasks still. I think it's just seniors are learning this stuff faster at the moment and adapting it faster to current work, but as all that changes I would guess juniors reclaim some value back.
That said, you hit on something I've been feeling, the thing these models are best at by far is stuff that wasn't worth doing before.
I've been making use of copilot in VSCode to make changes in a codebase that's new to me, in a language that I can read if not necessarily write unaided - it's a dialect of SQL, so I can certainly understand what's happening, but generating new queries is very time-consuming (half of which is just stupid formatting stuff). Copilot seems to understand the style of the code in my project and so I don't have to do much work to make it conform, compared to my hand-written versions.
I've also written a lot of python 2 in my career, and writing python 3 still isn't quite native-level for me - and the AI tools let me make up for my lack of knowledge of modern Python.