Like in the title. I see a lot of doomposting regarding AI recently, but I think that AI development shouldn't really affect senior devs. It impacts them mostly indirectly, through misguided management. I didn't see this angle discussed (maybe I missed it), so I'll discuss it here.

It's difficult to argue that AI is great at quickly coming up with solutions to well-defined, self-contained problems. At the same time, if your prompt is generic enough and the problem complex enough, AI will build an ungodly monstrosity that's impossible to maintain. This is because a simple, well-defined problem becomes an open question, and here the hallucinations begin.

However, even complex issues can be divided into a lot of smaller, well-defined ones. To divide the complex problem into smaller ones, one needs an engineer. The most important part of being a senior engineer is being able to turn a complex issue into a finite number of maintainable and well-defined steps to solve it. This is something that AI is not good at and never will be because turning one task into countless smaller tasks increases the cost and complexity of reasoning exponentially. As long as AI tries to be cost-efficient, and it's forced to do it by competition, it will produce code that's just good enough for marketing but actually bad enough that the actual engineering effort is irreplaceable.

This is why senior engineers will never be replaced, and AI is a tool useful mostly for them. They can define the problem as a set of smaller subproblems that AI is good at solving, and they can use the generated parts to compose the sound product that's easy to maintain.

AI hits the juniors the hardest because before it was often their job. However, in the process it creates the new gap: it will become harder to become a senior engineer, so the value of one will increase in time. When it increases enough, the need for producing new engineers will return eventually. It's just that it will become a more prestigious profession, with an entirely different road and methods of education.

I think this is where we stand now. Personally, I enjoy AI because I always preferred the high-concept work rather than being a coding monkey. I'm glad that AI took this part away from me, but each one's situation is different, so I genuinely understand the uncertainty and fear. Though I think that whoever survives this test will be much better off long-term than before.