Technology

This logic doesn't really track in my experience. Hiring junior devs was never about writing production code. It's an investment with the understanding that a junior will develop into an intermediate and senior in the future. It generally takes more time to mentor a junior and review their code than to simply code it myself. In addition, doing it myself will certainly result in higher quality, scalable, maintainable code.

This is the contradiction. Many seniors are seeing their productivity decline, because being forced to use AI is like mentoring 1 or 2 or 3 or 4 etc. juniors. The AI doesn't improve based on your individual mentorship making this a different type of "investment", if you can even call it that. This isn't about productivity or investing in labour. It's about creating a system by which the value of your labour power can be reduced.