> Anyone who wants a competitive advantage?

Do you mean long-term vision? Short-term the advantage is in hiring only seniors, but do you mean companies will foresee trouble looming ahead and "waste" money on juniors just to avert this disaster?

My own feeling is that this could become like a sort of... well, I recently heard of the term "population time bomb", and it was eye-opening for me. How once it starts rolling, it's incredibly hard/impossible to revert, etc.

So what if we have some sort of "experience time bomb" here? Businesses stop hiring juniors. Seniors are needed to make AI work, but their experience isn't passed on because... who to pass it to? And then juniors won't have this wealth of "on the job experience" to be able to smell AI disaster and course-correct. The kind of experience you learn from actual work, not books.

No, I think new developers who are "native" to this world will be a whole different breed. Maybe still not as good as seniors (as has always been the case) but closer than ever.

I could certainly see a wave of oversupply of juniors followed by a wave of undersupply. Say we stop hiring many juniors - a lot of people trying to get into industry right now are in for a rude time. Then maybe fewer people trying to learn it over the next few years, but those who do end up quite valuable.