AI didn’t kill the junior pipeline; companies did, because someone saw Claude write a for loop and decided that meant they could stop training humans. The result is an industry cheerfully pulling the ladder up behind itself, hollowing out its seniors, and outsourcing its entire talent strategy to vendors that will eventually triple the price. If you don’t hire juniors now, don’t act surprised in five years when you’re surrounded by AI-generated code nobody understands and trying to buy senior engineers from a market everyone else forgot to replenish.