Exactly, I absolutely agree that AI supercharges seniors with judgment and conviction. They’re no longer constrained by how fast they can type.

But this is about what comes next i.e. seniors of tomorrow

If AI gets so good at software that vibe coding is the new norm and as Elon Musk says that AI will generate the machine code directly without any intermediate compilation or interpretation then we wouldn’t need seniors or juniors but I don’t think that’s coming any time soon, if at all!

I doubt AI will ever generate straight up machine code directly as a best practice. Hierarchical, high-level abstractions help even AI reasoning. Re-reading some undifferentiated machine code make it harder to reason about even for the AI, while having a compact representation expressing the high level algo is much more efficient.

Regarding seniors of tomorrow, I think there are big differences between good devs and sub-mediocre ones, and I think their proportion won't change, and the good ones will have the drive to use the AI to learn and understand because they are simply curious and want to know. But most programmers don't care at all, and that's the case even today, and they will be less forced to learn. But I don't think we will lose much with this. Important things are held up by a small proportion of engineers, a Pareto-like principle.