I agree with the author that AI has the tragic ability to replace junior developers, but not senior ones. The problem is that the only way to become a senior developer is to have been a junior developer, so that in a few years, the lack of junior developers today will mean a lack of senior developers tomorrow.

As a software architect, I know the complaint: many senior developers hate working with junior developers, because it takes them more time to supervise the junior developer than to write the code themselves. AI gives them (senior developers) a chance to do what the junior developer would do a little slower, an order of magnitude faster; so why train a junior developer?

I suppose in five years, all senior developers will be poached from open source projects, since that's the only pipeline remaining.

Documentation won't save you if you've forgotten how to code

The author addresses that claim.

We document everything. Site Books, SDDs, RVS reports, boilerplate modules with full coverage. It works today, because the people reading those docs have the engineering expertise to act on them. What happens when they don’t? Honestly, I don’t know. Maybe AI in five years is good enough that it won’t matter. Maybe the problem stays manageable. I can’t predict the capabilities of models in 2031.

But crises don’t send calendar invites. Nobody expected a full-scale land war in Europe in 2022. The defense industry had thirty years to prepare and didn’t. Even Fogbank had records. They weren’t enough without the people who understood what they meant.