I've never worked anywhere where the role of a Sr was to glue together a bunch of small pieces written by a team of Jr devs.

I've only worked places where Jr's were given roughly the same scope of work as a mid-level dev but on non-critical projects where they could take as much time as necessary and where mistakes would have a very small blast radius.

That type of Jr work has not been made redundant - although I suppose now its possible for a PM or designer to do that work instead (but if your PMs are providing more value by vibe coding non-critical features than by doing their PM work maybe you don't really need a PM?)

If worked with many companyies that have only 1 SR dev per team. The SR typically spends at least half their time overseeing the work of the rest of the team... Not saying this is a good structure but it is common.

I think the idea was that LLMs can allow someone who has no idea how to code, to write a prompt that can in fact output some working code. This is greatly raising their skill floor, as opposed to a senior where at best it’s doing something they already can do, just faster.

The elephant in the room being that if you aren’t senior enough to have written the code you’ll probably run into a catastrophic bug that you are incapable of fixing (or prompting the LLM to fix) very very quickly.

Really it’s just the next iteration of no-code hype where people dream of building apps without code, but then reality always come back to the fact that the essential skill of programmers is to understand and design highly structured and rigid logical systems. Code is just a means of specification. LLMs make it easier to leverage code patterns that have been written over and over by the hundreds of thousands of programmers that have contributed to its training corpus, but they can not replace the precision of thought needed to make a hand-wavy idea into a concrete system that actually behaves in a way that humans find useful.