Junior software engineers not being hired is not the same as not needing them. Now I have to fight senior employees that do worse things than junior employees (and produce worse software than two years ago), because they delegate their work to the AI without checking or reviewing anything at all, or questioning the AI architecture "decisions", and we have more incidents than ever...
this is so accurate it hurts. the amount of my coworkers who just outright have handed any and all thinking over to the computer is staggering. its not just senior either, plenty of devs at the lead and staff level are producing complete garbage that has to be rolled back within an hour of deploy because it is extremely broken, no one verified, and it passed automated checks.
there are several features over the last few months that were obviously made and deployed and no one even launched the dev server and tried a single thing to verify if it was right. just "pull my ticket, do my ticket, push my ticket. i am a developer."
It's really depressing watching brilliant software developers and engineers producing the worst, unmaintainable code imaginable, and being okay with shipping it because it's passing the test suite. Assuming the test suite is any good anyway (because holy crap, the nonsensical tests AI writes...)
Your code used to be a masterpiece, so well crafted it's easy for AI to tweak and modify because you've got everything so logically organised and scoped... and now this is what you're producing? Hard to debug monstrosities that only an LLM can realistically bolt new features or tweaks onto, because it can do the kinds of refactoring necessary each time.
We use to talk about the fact that code should be readable because you spend more time reading it than writing it, but I think that misses the key part that readable code is also typically easier to debug. If you can read and understand the code, you can follow the logic when things are wrong in production, and you can more easily reason about the emergent properties of interactions between the complex systems that are involved.