I expect the demand for junior developers to increase exponentially in the next years when the market adapts to the new AI tools as more than ever, every business will be a tech business.
The actual "code" was never the hard part to begin with.
Developing software is not going away soon. LLMs only addresses a small part of what it means to develop software.
Re LLMs: most people responding here seem to assume there will be zero progress in ML after today. I don’t understand why. It’s likely we will get gpt-5 later this year, followed by Opus 3.5 and Ultra 1.5. I expect all three to be significantly better at coding than current models. Again, all three are expected within the next 6 months. Next gen after that (gpt-6 level): 2025-2026. Again, I don’t see any reasons not to expect further improvements. At that point (2026 at the latest) it will be strange to pay humans to write code, at least in the typical way we view SWE role today.
Most every single talented ECE person can easily get any software job with minimal prep. Half of the leetocde style coding questions are pointer manipulations, the other half rely on some n linked lists, both of which you get a lot of exposure to when working with low level algorithms.
Furthermore, in the scope of AI, we aren't really close to AGI, and even if we were, the power draw of compute is still quite large. There is a lot of progress to be made in making the compute more accessible to average person.