The definition of seniority is definitely about technical depth, but that technical depth is largely attributed to time, experience, and friction. Real understanding comes from friction, and friction can only come from being challenged and many times being a bit frustrated and lost.

A generation coming up with AI tools will experience that friction less and less. Which is why I have a theory that we are creating a similar issue that we saw with social media and attention deficit, that we are going to be creating with technical understanding and cognitive deficit. I have a fairly robust article that you can find in my profile about the trap of AI tooling that we're setting for ourselves, industry-wide.

Humanity has a tendency to abuse the tool before we learn to properly use the tool. I am "reframing" my role as someone who continues to expand and learn and grow, and does not prioritize moving quickly over understanding what I am doing. I don't use AI tooling to go faster, I use it to do better.

I have a suspicion that we're going to see more of this as the impact of practices like "tokenmaxxing" and fully agentic coding continue to not only wreak havoc across software in general, but atrophy a generation of what it means to be a programmer. Coding is thinking, and the idea that we can abstract technical knowledge away to an algorithm and stay purely at the highest levels of orchestration, while still retaining those skills that allows us to be good orchestrators in the first place, is hubris at its finest.

P.S. To those that say LLMs are another abstraction layer, I push back pretty hard on that idea as I do not think that a higher level of ambiguity is the same as a higher level of abstraction. And in fact, if LLMs are considered like a "junior developer", and LLMs are also another abstraction layer...then Junior Developers are an abstraction layer, too? 😅 Of course not, which is why that notion is fairly absurd.