You hear it at every meetup and under every thinkpiece: AI is coming for the junior developers first. The logic is always the same. Juniors do the simple work, agents do the simple work now, so there's no room left for juniors.
I'm a junior developer, and I run coding agents every working day on real tickets. I think that logic has the facts right and the conclusion wrong.
Here's the part that's true. If you treat the agent as a faster typist and compete with it on typing, you lose. It is faster than you, and that isn't close. The old junior job, the one that was mostly typing with a learning problem attached, really is shrinking.
Here's the part people miss. The moment you stop competing with the agent and start driving it, the job turns into judgment, verification, and taste. Those are learnable, and a junior who practises them on real work builds them fast, because every task the agent does can come with its reasoning attached if you insist on it. You get a running explanation of the codebase, all day, at whatever pace you can absorb.
Two concrete things that moved the needle for me.
