I Am a Junior Developer and I Would Like to Be Deprecated Gracefully
A version notice, a migration guide, and at least one release cycle of warnings. Is that so much to ask?
I graduated in May. I have a job, which I understand is now a rare thing for someone with my title, and I am grateful for it. I write code, I review the code an agent writes, and I attend a standup at which another agent asks me what I did yesterday. I am not writing to complain about any of that. I am writing to ask for something modest: when you remove me, do it the way you would remove a public API.
Announce it. Put a notice in the changelog. "JuniorDeveloper is deprecated as of v2027.1 and will be removed in a future release. Use Agent.run() instead." Give me a version window. Give me a migration guide, even a bad one. Let me spend one release cycle emitting warnings so that anyone who depends on me can update their integrations.
I have watched how the industry handles this and it is not that. It is a 5:47 a.m. email with the subject line "Quick Sync." It is a laptop that stops connecting to the VPN before the meeting starts. It is a manager, or a system that replaced a manager, informing me that the team is "evolving" and that my role "is not part of the evolution," a sentence that I would flag in code review for being both passive and load-bearing.
You did not treat your old REST endpoints this way. When you retired v1 of the API, you gave customers 18 months, a dashboard showing their remaining calls, and a blog post with a diagram. I am asking for the diagram.
I know the argument. The agent does 90 percent of what I do, faster. I have seen the pull requests. Some of them are better than mine. What the agent does not do, yet, is grow into the person who will know why the system is shaped the way it is, because it was not there. Neither, in three years, will anyone else be. You are removing the function that generates senior engineers and you have not written down what calls it.
So: a notice. A window. A guide. And if you can manage it, a line at the bottom that says "Thank you for using JuniorDeveloper," which is a thing you already do for a database driver.
I'll be at standup. The agent will ask what I'm blocked on. I'll say "this," and it will schedule a retro.