> I don’t understand why there’s this focus on juniors as the people who know AI best.

Because junior engineers have no problem with wholeheartedly embracing AI - they don't have enough experience to know what doesn't work yet.

In my personal experience, engineers who have experience are much more hesitant to embrace AI and learn everything about it, because they've seen that there are no magic bullets out there. Or they're just set in their ways.

To management that's AI obsessed, they want those juniors over anyone that would say "Maybe AI isn't everything it's cracked up to be." And it really, really helps that junior engineers are the cheapest to hire.

It's interesting because usually correctly collecting requirements and specifying a program is more difficult than actually coding it. Especially when you get into things like building secure, maintainable, extendable applications, that integrate well with legacy systems and so on.