Everyone keeps predicting that AI eliminates the junior engineer first.
I think that prediction aims at the wrong rung of the ladder.
Maya is the best mid-level engineer on her team. Give her a ticket and she ships it: clean code, good tests, on time, every time. For six years that reliability made her indispensable. Then the two juniors on her team got Claude Code, and within a month they were closing tickets at her pace.
The thing Maya was great at became the thing everyone is great at. Overnight.
To see why this lands on the middle rung specifically, ignore the years attached to each title and look at what each rung is for.
