Who is going to teach junior developers ?

I use dev as a shorthand for "software engineer", meaning someonone who knows how to code but also understand why he is tasked on that feature and understand the customer need, contratry to the programmer who just know how to code

We used to have a lot of small tasks to give to junior developers, small bugs to fix, add a parameter to an API, remove an N+1, and also a lot of small projects included in bigger projects.

But nowadays any coding agent can do these things by just reading the Jira ticket, it will do it better and faster than any junior developer. So my big question is: who needs junior devs anymore? And if nobody needs them, who are the senior developers of tomorrow?

November 2025 is the date at which coding agents (with the release of Opus 4.5 on Claude Code) started to be good enough to resolve simple tasks autonomously. You had to structure your thoughts, help it a little bit, but if you knew what you wanted to do, it was saving you some time. But things have progressed since then, and now any senior backend developer is gaining at least 2x productivity on any task, and all small tasks take 0 time, only the testing phase is taking us time.

Honestly, I don't see how I could become more productive. Yes, I could launch several tasks in parallel, but I would still need to review them and test them manually. Claude Code makes much fewer mistakes than me. I could be more productive if Claude Code was faster, and it is going to be faster soon, with all the cheap models competing. It is only fast on backend actually; on frontend this is much less convincing.

In my opinion, a senior dev is more than 2 times more productive than a junior for the same task, not even counting the review time, so it makes no sense to hire juniors. From a money standpoint it makes no sense, for a people management standpoint it makes no sense. I don't see a future where we have junior developers. Any product person that understands basic code is going to be better than a junior dev. To me, a junior dev that only has the skill to code is useless. Juniors need to do product also and understand the customer, understand why we build features, etc.

The senior dev that was never interested about the product part of his features, is just a programmer and his job, like the junior dev, is going to be useless in the future. We will still have experts that know only their field, like DBAs, front architects, low-level programmers, etc. but programmers that have basic knowledge of development and are just writing and writing lines of code are going to disappear entirely.

Do we even need to learn how to code anymore? I mean by typing text? Maybe we will teach students only how to reason, how to architect, what are the different patterns, how to optimize performance-wise a block of code? Can we understand all these things without knowing how to code? I don't know. But today only these skills are useful at all.

Do we even need to learn how to read code anymore? LLMs are better at summarizing a piece of code, they are better at finding bugs, they are better at finding edge cases, they are better at investigating a question on a codebase.

Coding harnesses have their limits, but none of their limits can be fixed by junior devs. Junior devs are either going to be vibe coders, meaning they are not devs, but PMs, or maybe they are going to be manual testers, but I'm not hiring a junior dev anymore.