This is written without any acknowledgement of how short-term thinking has poisoned the entire (world of work? Capitalist system? IDK).

Yes, killing your talent pipeline is a horrible idea. But that's Future CEO's problem. When we need new seniors to backfill natural attrition, we can poach them from competitors.

And juniors don't make that much less money, either. Sure, there are people who do light frontend work on Wordpress sites and stuff, who make a lot less. But at my place of work, when we had junior SWEs (we either developed them into seniors in the past 3 years or let them attrition), they were making about ¾ of what seniors make. So, you can pay 4 juniors or you can pay 2-3 seniors. Arguably 1 senior using AI will be a lot more sustainable than 4 juniors burning tokens all day trying to get Cursor to do things they don't really even understand and can't evaluate effectively.

Anyway I completely agree that all of this, especially eliminating the bottom 2 steps of the career ladder for engineers, is horrible for our entire industry. But our incentive structure will richly reward companies for doing this. Stock price go up. Let Future CEO worry about it.