Around here AI isn't really more of a threat to juniors than it is to seniors. It's a threat to the people who have been taught "recipies" rather than applied computer science. You can have excellent seniors who can do TDD, DRY, SOLID and so on, who also happen to have no idea what a L1 cache miss is. The current AI models know all of those things, but they struggle applying them correctly without someone piloting them. Even in the energy industry where I work, where you'd think it would be obvious from the context that you should prioritize runtime safety over debug safety, the current AI models struggle to do so. As far as seniority goes, though. If we can find a young developer with little experience who actually knows computer science, we're much more likely to hire them... Since they are cheaper.

This isn't something which is unique to software development though. We're currently building enterprise AI apps that we can deploy into the AI agents working for anyone of our employees. The key thing we're currently seeing is that the people in a team who are the ones that everyone turn to for advice, are the only people who aren't in "danger". Even people who are great at their jobs are being outperformed by AI in many cases.

I think it'll be a massive challenge for our society in the coming years. Maybe we're even going to get to the point where the AI will also be capable of replacing a lot of the "domain experts". Right now that seems far out, but then, if you had asked me about AI four months ago I would've told you it was all hype.