" but being a junior dev first is how you become a senior dev."
If AI keeps improving, I am not so sure about that. Smart people may be able to quickly jump to senior skills. And what we view as senior skills at the moment may become useless.
This feels to me like a very naive statement, you don't just learn something magically because it permeates, it's because of experience and number of failures or actually really playing with a system.
If you are always on crutches and need the AI companion all the steps of the way, you basically offload the most important part of the work which is the whole cognitive work.
That "senior skill" is the debugging of complex systems that often interconnects in unusual ways, why? Because this might be a one off this might not be well documented, or even the code might not really point at the issue because it might be a subtle interplay of hardware and software.
Even if you are smart, it doesn't solve the problem that people still have to learn, and institutional knowledge is more important at times, because this might not be documented or easy to figure out, even with the greatest AI companion...
If AI keeps improving, I am not so sure about that. Smart people may be able to quickly jump to senior skills. And what we view as senior skills at the moment may become useless.