Agents X Junior X Senior Engineers 👇

Agents X Junior X Senior Engineers 👇

During some recent conversations, a few people said something along the lines of:

“So basically you’ve automated the work of junior engineers, not senior engineers.”

At first, that didn’t sit right with me.

I was looking at what Agents and their sub-agents were doing and mentally comparing it with senior engineers I know (including myself):

• Polyglot across stacks.
• Knows all the frameworks and tools.
• Ships at a ridiculous token-per-second rate.
• Can refactor, translate, and extend across languages on command.

How on earth do you call that a junior?

If anything, it felt more like a distinguished engineer:

Socially awkward, most of the time right, occasionally jaw-dropping creative and productive… but every now and then, it makes mistakes so naive that no competent junior would ever make.

Maybe a bipolar distinguished engineer.

But sitting with it for a bit, I realised I was mixing two different things:

“Junior vs senior” is not a measure of raw coding power. It’s a measure of scope, judgement, and impact in the system.

When people say “you automated a junior”, what they’re really pointing at is this: – We’ve automated execution: turning reasonably well-framed problems into high-quality code, tests, refactors and migrations at scale. – We haven’t automated the parts of the job that look like: choosing the right problems, shaping scope with stakeholders, making portfolio-level trade-offs, designing operating models, growing humans.

In other words:

The agents behave like incredibly fast, disciplined ICs working inside a senior-designed envelope of architecture, quality gates, and guardrails. They don’t decide what matters. They don’t own the socio-technical system. They don’t mentor your team. They don’t sit in front of the execs and argue for a bet.

Right now, the real unit isn’t “agents”. It’s: senior engineers + agent fleets.

And from that lens, “you automated the junior layer” stops sounding like a criticism and starts sounding like the point:

• Free the scarce senior judgment to do the senior part of the job,
• by giving it an execution engine that never gets bored, never asks for a promotion, and doesn’t cut corners on tests (with the right guardrails in place).

That’s what I'm looking forward to: changing what “senior” actually spends their day doing.

How does that sit with you?