> I think your assumption is probably a little backwards. It will be a senior SDE clearing the slate I think.

I don't think you understood the point I made.

My point was not about Jr vs Sr, let alone how a Jr is somehow more capable than a Sr.

My point was that these productivity gains aren't a factor of experience of seniority, but they do devalue the importance of seniority to perform specific tasks. Just crack open a LLM, feed in a few prompts, and done. Hell, junior developers no longer need to reach out to seniors to as questions about any topic. Think about that for a second.

Just as an anecdote that might provide some context, this is not what I've observed. My observation is that senior engineers are vastly more effective at knowing how to employ and manage AI than junior engineers. Junior engineers are typically coming to the senior engineers to learn how to approach learning what the AI is good at and not good at because they themselves have trouble making those judgments.

I was working on a side project last night, and Gemini decided to inline the entire Crypto.js library in the file I was generating. And I knew it just needed a hashing function, so I had to tell it to just grab a hashing function and not inline all of Crypto.js. This is exactly the kind of thing that somebody that didn't know software engineering wouldn't be able to say, even as simple as it is. It made me realize I couldn't just hand this tool to my wife or my kids and allow them to create software because they wouldn't know to say that kind of thing to guide the AI towards success.