If I look strictly at speed, hiring a junior engineer right now doesn’t seem worth it.

An AI agent can write boilerplate, scripts, and documentation faster than any entry-level engineer. It doesn’t sleep and it costs practically nothing, so on paper the logic says to stop hiring juniors. I think that logic is completely wrong.

When a bad config takes down production, the AI doesn’t feel it. It doesn’t learn from its mistakes or change how it approaches the architecture next time.

Juniors do. They pick up scars, and that pain is exactly what turns them into senior engineers. AI can suggest patterns, but it doesn’t understand the tradeoffs behind them or why we avoid a certain configuration, only that the configuration exists.

I don’t hire juniors to write perfect syntax from scratch anymore. I hire them to make sense of systems. I need them to look at what the AI wrote and ask “Why does this work?” and “Where is it going to fail?” They still write code, but more and more of the job is thinking about the whole system and using AI to move faster.

If I stop hiring juniors, my pipeline collapses and I end up with a top-heavy team and nobody ready to step up. AI hasn’t eliminated the junior engineer, but it has changed how they grow.