AI agents are not replacing senior engineers, but they are absolutely destroying the entry level roles we used to rely on to train them. Everyone is arguing about whether AI coding agents will replace software engineers. They are missing what is actually happening. Claude Code, Cursor, and Codex are not replacing senior architects. They are replacing the specific, repetitive tasks that we historically assigned to junior engineers, QA testers, and entry level data analysts. The industry is currently hollowing out the bottom of the career ladder. We are getting very good at generating boilerplate code and automated test coverage, but we have no plan for where the next generation of senior engineers is supposed to come from if nobody is allowed to be a junior engineer anymore. The death of the junior ticket Five years ago, when we hired a junior backend engineer, we had a specific process for onboarding them. We gave them simple tickets.…