This seems like a pretty good take - you found that you could 'get rid of juniors' by working in an unsustainable way. Why not work with now-super-productive junior employees that can spread the cognitive load?

It would seem odd if this were the one time in the history of computing where a big productivity boost didn't just lead to increasingly big/complex software.

> Why not work with now-super-productive junior employees that can spread the cognitive load?

It's all about scaling up or out. Having co-workers is like scaling out, you have to worry about aligning your goals, there's a lot of communication overhead in general. Using ChatGPT is like scaling up, you're just upgrading your skills and intelligence and you still have very low latency as there is only one mind in control.

As the OP's problems suggest, you can only scale "up" with ChatGPT to a certain point before it starts to introduce new productivity problems and even problems related to burnout and being able to properly digest and understand everything being thrown at you. With respect to teams, it also introduces risk by ensuring that larger workloads that may previously have been shared by multiple people are concentrated to a single person.

Sure - it's just like moving to a better IDE, or a higher level programming language, or a 10x faster CPU (which has happened a couple times now in my career), or a better compiler. All of those things just increased the expectations and ambitions for what a team could accomplish/manage though.