The main problem in this environment is IMO: how does a junior become a senior, or even a bad junior become a good junior. People aren't learning fundamentals anymore beyond what's taught, and all the rest of 'trade knowledge' is now never experienced, people just trust that the LLM has absorbed it sufficiently. Engineering is all about trade-offs. Failing to understand why from 10 possible ways of achieving something, 4 are valid contenders and possible 1-2 are best in the current scenario, and even the questions to ask to get to that answer, is what makes a senior.
I think the solution becomes clearer - juniors need to worry less about knowing how to program in a void, since the LLM can handle most of that, but care more about how to produce code that doesn't break things, that doesn't have unintended 2nd order effects, that doesn't add unneeded complexity, etc.
In my experience I see juniors come out of college who can code in isolation as well as me or better. But the difference between jr/sr is much more about integration, accuracy and simplicity than raw code production. If LLMs remove a lot of the hassle of code production I think that will BENEFIT the other elements, since those things will be much more visible.
Personally, I think juniors are going to start emerging with more of a senior mindset. If you don't have to sweat uploading tons of programming errata to your brain you can produce more code abd more quickly need to focus on larger structural challenges. That's a good thing! Yes, they will break large codebases but they have been soing that forever, if given the chance. The difference now is they will start doing that much sooner.
The LLM is the coding tool, not the arbiter of outcome.
A human’s ability to assess, interrogate, compare, research, and develop intuition are all skills that are entirely independent of the coding tool. Those skills are developed through project work, delivering meaningful stuff to someone who cares enough to use it and give feedback (eg customers), making things go whoosh in production, etc etc.
This is a XY problem and the real Y are galaxy brains submitting unvalidated and shoddy work that make good outcomes harder rather than easier to reach.
