Everyone agrees AI makes senior engineers more valuable. Almost nobody asks where the next generation of seniors is supposed to come from. The work AI automated away was never waste, it was the apprenticeship, and the hiring data says the bottom rung is already gone.
There's a story the industry loves telling right now: AI makes senior engineers more valuable. The people with judgment, the ones who can smell a bad design from the doorway, are the winners of this shift. It's a comforting story. It's even true.
It just has a hole in the middle big enough to drive a hiring freeze through. Seniors are not a renewable resource. Nobody arrives with fifteen years of scar tissue preinstalled. Every senior you've ever worked with started as a junior who got handed unglamorous work and spent years doing it. And AI has quietly eaten the exact work those years were made of.
This isn't a piece about whether AI writes good code. It writes plenty. It's about what happens to the supply of people who can tell.
Where Seniors Actually Come From
