AI Will Replace Junior Developers

I keep hearing this. And I think it misses something obvious.

Where do senior developers come from?

They don't emerge fully formed from a bootcamp. They're built through years of debugging someone else's code, shipping features that break, and learning why "it works on my machine" isn't good enough.  Years, decades even, of gaining insights, building scar tissue, learning from experience, honing their craft.
Junior developers aren't going away. But productivity expectations are going up. AI will “automate” straightforward coding tasks.  This is no different than the many other productivity tools we have seen over the years.  All this means is that junior developers, and senior ones too, need to learn to use the latest/greatest productivity tools.

And, shift their work towards the higher-leveraged aspects of the job sooner, things such as architecture, code quality oversight, CI/CD, Dev Ops, user experience, functional and usability excellence, etc.

And, soft skills such as organizational, initiative and self starting, communication, teamwork are more important than ever.

And, most importantly, expanding the role beyond software development to include business and product mindset.  Navigating and optimizing within the real world business constraints, hitting the bullseye of meeting the business requirements with MVP level of focus.

That's a higher bar, not an exit sign.

What are you seeing in your teams? Are juniors, and seniors, thriving with AI tools or struggling to find their footing?