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

I have a confession to make.

Five years ago, if I had a tedious task like writing unit tests for a legacy module or converting a JSON schema, I would assign it to a Junior Developer. It was boring work for me, but it was gold for them. It taught them the codebase, it taught them discipline, and it taught them how systems break.

Today, I don't assign that task to a Junior. I assign it to Copilot / Claude.

It is faster. It is cheaper. It is often more accurate (at least syntactically).

And that is exactly why the software industry is walking off a cliff.

The Broken Ladder

We are currently optimizing for short-term velocity at the expense of long-term survival. By using AI to automate the "boring" entry-level tasks, we have inadvertently removed the bottom rungs of the career ladder.

A Senior Developer isn't just someone who knows syntax. A Senior Developer is someone who has broken production 50 times and knows how to fix it. You don't learn that by reading tutorials. You learn that by doing the grunt work that we are now automating away.

If we stop hiring Juniors because "AI can do it", where will the Seniors come from in 2030?

The "Vibe Coding" Trap

I see a lot of excitement about "Vibe Coding", the idea that you can just prompt your way to a product without understanding the underlying code.

This works fine for a prototype. It is a disaster for longevity.

When a Junior writes bad code, I review it, we talk about it, and they learn why it was bad. They grow. When an AI writes bad code, I just re-prompt it. No one learns anything. We are filling our codebases with logic that no human fully understands, maintained by a generation of developers who never learned the fundamentals because the machine did it for them.

The Knowledge Gap

We are creating a "Barbell Distribution" in tech:

The Super-Seniors: Developers with 10+ years of experience who use AI as a force multiplier. We are becoming 10x faster.

The AI Users: People who can prompt but cannot debug a race condition or understand memory management.

The middle is disappearing. The path from Group 2 to Group 1 is gone.

What Happens Next?

I don't have the solution, but I know the current path is unsustainable. Companies need to stop viewing Junior hiring as "charity" or a "cost center" and start viewing it as an existential insurance policy.

We need to hire Juniors not to write code (AI can do that), but to audit AI. We need to teach them "Forensic Coding", the art of understanding why the machine hallucinated.

Discussion

Are you seeing this in your company? Is your team still hiring Juniors, or has the pipeline frozen?

Junior devs: How are you finding the job market right now? Senior devs: Are you worried about who will replace you?

Let's talk about it.