Two years ago I could tell you exactly who counted as a senior developer. I can't cleanly classify myself now.
This is a profession that doesn't have a name yet. In the agent-orchestrator role, nobody is senior.
A craft being invented in real time
Michael Werle, a Technical Fellow at Indeed, wrote it down in March: AGENTS.md, MCP, Skills, Commands, Sandboxing, Subagents, Ralph Loops, Orchestrators: "I cannot keep up; maybe no one can fully." That isn't a complaint. It's a status report on a profession being invented in real time.
Lalit Wadhwa, writing in CIO in February, names the same shift from the business side. The new operating model is three words: delegate, review, own. Agents write first drafts. Humans review. Architecture stays human. The orchestration layer, which Wadhwa calls "the conductor of the AI orchestra," becomes the central engineering skill of the next few years.
Building Phora is my daily version of this. I write skills, wire MCP servers (Model Context Protocol) together, design memory systems, tune agent sequences. Most of my day goes into deciding what to ask, not what to type.
Why this isn't the threat it feels like
The mood is threatening. Junior roles are thinning out, syntactic knowledge is being devalued, and a lot of colleagues feel something passing them by. None of that needs sugar-coating.
But Werle reaches for an interesting parallel: Jevons paradox. When steam engines got more efficient, coal consumption didn't drop. It rose. Efficiency opened new domains. Radiologists are living through the exact same thing: AI didn't replace them, it made them more valuable.
Software is heading the same way. There will be more software, not less. The only question is who builds it and how. Anyone taking the orchestrator role seriously today is roughly where Tim Berners-Lee's first students were in 1995.
The pioneer's window
The catch: no one is going to teach you. There are no courses, no settled best practices, and half of what you learn this month will be obsolete by autumn. Werle argues the craft itself hasn't changed. He's half right. The high-level craft, problem decomposition, judgment, taste, really does carry over. The texture of the work doesn't.
The new profession has no name either. "Agent-orchestrator," "context engineer": each partial, none final. But the craft already exists. Whoever commits to it now is writing the first textbook.
That kind of opening doesn't come along more than once or twice in a career.
There's always a next level.
If you like what you see (whether you're building a product or a team) I'd love to hear about it.