As I've said before, AI is a force multiplier. A 10x developer is now a 100x developer and a -10x developer (complexity maker/value destroyer) is now a -100x developer.

I can understand why a lot of companies are cutting junior roles. What AI does is it automates most of the stuff that juniors are good at (coding fast) but not much of the stuff that the seniors are good at.

That said, I've worked with some juniors who managed to navigate; they do this by focusing on higher order thinking and developing a sense of what's important by interacting with senior engineers. Unfortunately, it raises the talent bar for juniors; they have to become more intelligent; not in a puzzle-solving way, but in a more architectural big-picture sort of way; almost like entrepreneurial thinking but more detailed/complex.

LLMs don't have a worldview; this means that they miss a lot of inconsistencies and logical contradictions. Also, most critically, LLMs don't know what's important (at least not accurately enough) so they can't prioritize effectively and they make a lot of bad decisions.

It's kind of interesting for me because a lot of the areas where I had a contrarian opinion in the field of software development, I now see LLMs getting trapped into those and getting bad results. It's like all my contrarian opinions became much more valuable.