I Am Charlie Graham

Junior Roles Aren’t Going Away

Charlie Graham -

There's been a lot of doom and gloom about AI wiping out entry-level jobs. Every other post I see claims junior developers, analysts, and marketers are about to become extinct.

Having spent the last year deep in the AI-rena, building products with Claude Code/Cursor, using tools like Ideogram, Midjourney, and Creatify for content creation, and watching how my company’s needs have changed, I think this narrative is overplayed.

Junior roles aren’t going to die. They’re going to transform.

Let's Be Honest About What's Changed

First, let's be clear, AI agents do remove roles. At previous companies I founded, I needed a team of developers to build a robust website, integrate it into deployment pipelines, configure hosting, make the UI look good, and handle all the moving parts. I needed marketers to create content, design images in Figma, Canva, and Photoshop, manually research, and write notes to customers and prospects. Now, AI agents can handle a huge portion of that.

In the last six months, my work has shifted from working with people to working with agents. Creation tasks I previously gave to employees and contractors, like writing code, designing interfaces, setting up infrastructure, drafting blog posts, are now being handled largely by AI. While not nearly as good as the top talent I have worked with, these agents have the advantage of being <10% the cost, available 24/7, and responding with results in a few minutes instead of hours or days.

In this new AI-based world, new roles are emerging. In technology, I am constantly bottlenecked reviewing code because AI is about 80% right, which means it goes off the rails 20% of the time. I have to check and test the UI output because AI can't judge taste. For marketing, I review outreach emails and posts to ensure they match my voice and are accurate. I still plan bullet points, craft prompts, and edit AI-written drafts. Where I was once limited by creation speed, now I'm limited by review and refinement.

As a result, the kinds of people I hire have changed. Instead of experts or junior people with the potential to become expert coders or content creators, I'm looking for the future expert AI managers: marketers, product folks, or engineers who can prompt clearly, orchestrate multiple tools well, work different AI brands against each other to improve output, and guide AI toward the right answer. 

The Real Job Shift

I believe I'm at the forefront of a trend that will spread to many companies in the next 12–24 months.

Today, companies hire for coding chops, writing skills, or analysis ability. Those roles will shrink and be replaced by people who can become experts at:

  • Prompting and directing AI agents precisely
  • Clear communication, turning complex ideas into effective prompts
  • Multi-tasking expertise, quickly and constantly context-switching and responding to different AIs at their stopping points
  • AI orchestration, using different AI agents and having them check each other
  • Managing AI workflows and knowing when to intervene
  • Native AI intuition, an intuitive understanding of how AI works, where it is likely to go wrong, and how to keep it on track

Fundamentals Matter, But Not the Nitty-Gritty

In the new world of AI, foundational knowledge won't vanish.

A junior developer still needs to understand programming basics, architecture, and what good code looks like. They just don't need to write every line from scratch or memorize syntax tricks (the tabs vs. spaces debate is about to die out). A junior analyst needs to grasp statistics, business logic, and what makes data meaningful. They don't need to be Excel wizards who build complex formulas by hand.

A strong foundation helps people judge AI output, spotting when it’s usable versus when it looks fine but will break in production. It helps them see if an analysis makes sense or is nonsense.

Learning fundamentals you may never use is nothing new. While in undergrad, I spent many sleepless weekends building a multi-process, threaded operating system. It was important to learn the fundamentals of how software works on computers, even though I have never touched that low-level programming since.

Think of it like this: most accountants learned how to multiply and do long division, but they rarely do it by hand anymore. The future workers in our country will learn the basics, but likely never use them.

The New Junior Killer Skill, Native AI Intuition

The new essential skill for junior people will be AI intuition. As AI becomes deeply integrated into workplaces, having a native intuition for how AI thinks, operates, and fails will be critical. Future junior employees will need to instinctively understand AI’s capabilities and limitations, anticipate where it will stumble, and proactively steer it back on track. They will become adept at managing multiple AIs simultaneously, switching context at each AI’s stopping point. They will know when to continue with a session or to just restart with a new agent instance. This intuitive grasp won’t just make them more effective, it will make them exceptionally valuable. Companies will depend on their judgment to bridge the gap between AI-generated output and human-level precision.

While some senior employees will jump into AI, many will only scratch the surface of its potential. High school and college students growing up alongside AI tools will naturally develop deeper intuitive understanding. Much like students of the 1980s and early '90s who grew up immersed in computers, or those of the late '90s who intuitively understood the Internet, today’s youth will master AI at a speed older generations can’t match. Companies integrating AI will eagerly recruit this next generation to become the new managers -  managers of AI agents and sub-agents..

The Lack of Junior Job Opportunities is Temporary

Right now, there’s a mismatch. College grads are trained for skills that were useful for the last few decades but will not be as relevant in the future.  At the same time, while companies think they can replace junior talent with AI, they will quickly hit a bottleneck managing, coordinating, and reviewing AI work. While people assume AI will handle this itself, we aren’t there yet. Human oversight is going to be needed for the foreseeable future.

Educational institutions today aren’t yet teaching AI intuition as a fundamental skill, but they must start. Schools that adapt quickly and integrate AI into their curricula will position their students as future leaders.  And if schools don’t do this, students need to take this on their own, much like the earliest programmers did programming on the side while waiting for the school curriculum to catch up.  These AI native students will leap ahead, becoming the innovators, creators, and managers of tomorrow.

Junior roles aren’t going away. Like every wave of new technology, they'll be transformed.