Companies are only shooting themselves in the foot in the long term if they stop hiring junior engineers, and most of that work is not being replaced, it’s being shifted to the senior engineers who now have to babysit AIs that can’t actually do the job for any extended period of time. If you’re accepting AI code into a codebase without thorough review, then you’re also shooting yourself in the foot in the long term, because even the senior engineers won’t know the codebase after a while. If you’re doing thorough reviews in order to catch the AI bugs, well then you’re probably better off coding it yourself correctly in the first place, unless you’ve already allowed your skills to atrophy.

Do you really think AIs are reasoning when you ask them to troubleshoot technical issues? You may be lucky if the issue is already in their training data, but anything even slightly novel, and the AI is just going to bullshit an answer, and I guess you’re going to follow it blindly, since you don’t know enough to come up with an answer yourself.

Besides all that, how is open source AI going to stop junior developers from losing their jobs?