Ask HN: Is everyone only hiring senior developers? And is it because of AI?

If you're not experienced and you're young - take mom and dad's offer to keep living at home while you buy a domain name and ask them if they can help pay for a billion or so tokens of AI. Build something novel (there are basically unlimited ideas right now). You can even find something that's been done before but the entrenched players are taking forever to figure out their AI strategy. Do it before they buy 3 ai startups that are the strategy - better yet, be one of those startups that get bought.

I don't think its because of AI, I believe its mostly due to the terrible global economy that companies don't wish to spend money on training and introducing juniors / mid-levels to their new workflow and would rather just bring in an experienced developer

We need to start a company that is like a cooperative that trains juniors to become seniors.