LLMs are advancing as well, just not from your/my direct input. Or from our direct input ( considering they learn from our own questions ) and from 100k others that are using them for their work.

Juniors today can learn exponentially faster with LLMs and don't need seniors as much.

Take me for example, I've been programming for 20 years, been through C, C++, C#, Python, JS, PHP but recently had to learn Angular 18 and Fastapi. Even though I knew JS and Python before hand these frameworks have ways of doing things I'm not used to so I've been fumbling with them for the first 100 hours. However when I finally installed Copilot and had a little faith in it I boosted my productivity 3-4x. Of course it didn't write everything correct, of course it used outdated angular instead of latest (which is why I was so reluctant to ask stuff for it at the start) but it still helped me a lot because it is much easier (for me) to modify some bad/outdated code and get it to where I want it than write it from scratch without the muscle memory of the new framework.

So for me it's been a godsend. I expect for stuff that's not as cutting edge as new framework oddities that appeared in the last 12 months it is even more helpful and % of it being correct would be way higher so for juniors that are doing say Python coding on frameworks that have at least 3-4 years and are stable enough the seniors would need to intervene much much less in correcting the junior.

> Juniors today can learn exponentially faster with LLMs and don't need seniors as much. [...] Take me for example, I've been programming for 20 years

You are not a junior, you already rely on 20 years of experience.

Last time i did any sort of web development was 20 ago, but i thought to try some C# (touched last time ~10 years ago) + Blazor for an idea i had and it took me a couple of days to feel comfortable and start making stuff. While i haven't written for the web in a very very long time, my experience with other tech helped a lot.

His experience is the same in mine , the juniors in our team are super productive in a way that realistically would not have been possible for them before these tools. They just don't get stuck that much anymore so they don't need the seniors as much. I do think the field will be somewhat commoditized in the coming decade.

The web, especially frontend feels far more foreign than any backend or "traditional" programming. The errors suck, sometimes you get no error and have no idea why it isn't working etc. So in a sense I feel like a junior

I dont think people (in this context) are suggesting replacing the junior developers with AI, but to treat the AI like a junior: to be clear with what you need, and to be defensive with what you accept back from them; to try and be conscious of their limitations when asking them to do something, and to phrase your questions in a way that will get you the best results back.

They might not be but using language which equates these generative LLMs with junior developers does allow a shift of meaning to actually equate juniors with LLMs, meaning they are the interchangeable, and therefore generative LLMs can replace juniors.