Revenge of the Junior Developer

The essay that drew the chart. "Figure 1 — Evolution of AI Coding Strategies" has been screenshotted, redrawn, and argued over across the industry ever since. It plots six overlapping waves washing over traditional hand-coding: completions-based (2023), chat-based (2024), coding agents (2025 H1), agent clusters (2025 H2), and agent fleets (2026), with vibe coding as a dotted line cutting through all of them — any approach where the AI writes the code and the human doesn't. A second figure, the "FY26 Org Chart," depicts each IC dev managing clusters of coding agents that are themselves supervised by manager agents. The title is a deliberate reversal of the 2024 prequel The Death of the Junior Developer. The earlier piece worried AI would close the bottom rung of the ladder; this one argues the opposite is happening. Seniority turns out to be a liability when the tools change every quarter — senior developers have the most invested in the old way and the most reason to read the change as a threat. Juniors adopt faster, carry less baggage, and end up babysitting agents while the resisters get cut to pay the LLM bill. The line that travels: "It's not AI's job to prove it's better than you. It's your job to get better using AI."

The agent-clusters-and-fleets right edge of the chart is the world the Gas Town arc now occupies, called — as the later essays like to point out — about ten months early.