Comment by kentonv

Luckily, shareholders do not decide who to hire and fire. The actual officers of the company, hopefully, understand why senior engineers are non-fungible. Tech companies, at least, seem to understand this well. (I do think a lot of non-tech companies that nevertheless have software in their business get this wrong, and that's why we see a lot of terrible software out there. E.g. most car companies.)

As for junior engineers, despite the comparisons in coding skill level, I don't think most people are suggesting that AI should replace junior engineers. There are a lot of things humans do which AI still can't, such as seeing the bigger picture that the code is meant to implement, and also, as you note, learning over time. An LLM's consciousness ends with its context window.