1. AI still makes mistakes - you'll still need a mentor to guide it 2. AI doesn't learn - so all the companies leaning on AI to replace interns are just putting more pressure on whoever is required to clean up after the ai, but that pressure won't be relieved because the same mistakes will happen going forward.
These are just the immediate business reasons for the "no". The bigger over-arching reason is that if no-one is hired as a "junior", there's no-one ramping up from "just studied, full-confidence, zero experience" through "wow, I thought I knew stuff", "wow, I'm learning more and making fewer mistakes", "I'm capable enough to contribute to the team without hand-holding" and finally "I could mentor someone else". Replacing entry-level jobs with ai causes a proficiency vacuum down the road.
Of course, short-sightedness never stopped the greedy before.
"Chirag Agrawal, a senior software engineer, sees junior developer roles disappearing as companies try to do more with less.
“Four years ago, I was that junior developer writing boilerplate CRUD code, proud of every clean PR I merged,” he says. “Today? I watch new grads struggle to land their first job, not because they’re unskilled, but because companies ask, ‘Why hire a junior for $90K when GitHub Copilot costs $10?’”"
https://www.cio.com/article/4062024/demand-for-junior-develo...