Senior critical thinker
With the advance of software engineering as a discipline, “senior” and “junior” roles have become the new norm to call positions.
But a part of the programming is getting increasingly delegated to AI agents whether we like it or not. I would argue it is a good thing — we already have the term “recreational programming”. Such delegation can help free ourselves from the mundane parts of it and focus on the actually useful parts that LLMs cannot do. Critical thinking.
It is important that when discussing agentic AI we must bring up good points about and bad. Yes, it frees me from typing on the keyboard, reading obscure documentation and trying to understand complicated syntax rules (hello, TypeScript).
One the other hand, it can never accomplish my whole vision. I always have to guide it. And I always have to think critically about what it suggests, while at times it might be genius, at others it can be garbage.
And I feel like this won't change anytime soon, at least not for the parts of the systems that are critical. So, we soon might encounter a new position for hire: “Senior critical thinker with 15 years in web development”.