> you don’t get to be a senior engineer without being the kind of junior engineer that the LLMs are replacing
I disagree: LLM are not replacing the kind of junior engineer who become senior ones. They replace "copy from StackOverflow until I get something mostly working" coders. Those who end going up the management ladder, not the engineering one. LLM are (atm) not replacing the junior engineers who use tools to get an idea then read the documentation.
The best engineers and craftsmen - even juniors - understand which work is core to the craft and the end result, and which is peripheral.
Unless you're hyper-specialised within a large organisation, you can't bring the same degree of obsession to every part in the process, there will always be edges.
Even an artisan who hand-builds everything that matters may take some shortcuts in where they get their tools from, or the products they use to maintain them.
In a big org, you might have a specialist for every domain, but on small teams you don't.
And ultimately I've got other things to do with my life besides learning to write Cmake from scratch.
I disagree: LLM are not replacing the kind of junior engineer who become senior ones. They replace "copy from StackOverflow until I get something mostly working" coders. Those who end going up the management ladder, not the engineering one. LLM are (atm) not replacing the junior engineers who use tools to get an idea then read the documentation.