Funny you mention this because Opus 4.5 did this just yesterday. I accidentally gave it a task with conflicting goals, and after working through it for a few minutes it realized what was going on, summarized the conflict and asked me which goal should be prioritized, along with detailed pros and cons of each approach. It’s exactly how I would expect a mid level developer to operate, except much faster and more thorough.
Yes, they continue to get better, but they are not at human level (and jr devs are humans too) yet, and I doubt the next level "AGI" that people like Demis Hassabis are projecting to still be 10 years away will be human level either.
No doubt it depends on the company, but I'd say that in many places only 10% of what a developer does is coding, and the percentage is less and less the more senior you become and have other responsibilities.
In many companies, product development is very cyclic - new products and enhancement/modernization cycles come and result in months, maybe years, of intense development (architecture, design, maybe prototyping before coding) but then there may be many months of "downtime" before the next major development cycle, where coding gives way to ongoing support, tuning, bug triaging, etc.
Maybe in some large companies there are highly compartmentalized roles like business analyst, systems architect, developers, perhaps "coders" as a separate or junior category (I have never worked anyplace where "coders" was a thing, although some people seem to insist that it still is). My experience, of a lifetime of software development, mostly at smaller companies, is that "software developers" are expected to do all of the above as well as production support, documentation, mentoring, new technology evaluation, etc, etc. The boss wants to give you a high level assignment, and get back a product. At one company I worked it was literally "build us an EKG machine at this price point", which might be a bit of an extreme example.
The other thing a human software developer does during any "downtime" is self-initiated projects such as creating tools and infrastructure, automation, self-learning, refactoring, etc, and in my experience these self-initiated efforts can be just as, if not more, important to the overall productivity, and output quality, of the team as that of the product development cycles.
LLMs primary use is coding, although they can also be of use for conversational brainstorming about design, tooling, etc. If you are "vibe coding" (just ask the LLM to do it, and cross your fingers) then the LLM is also doing in effect doing architecture, design, tool selection etc.
Notwithstanding agents, which the AI companies proudly state may run for hours before messing up, LLMs are not autonomous entities that can replace developers and be handed high level assignments and will do what it takes (incl. communication with all stake holders, etc) to get the job done. They will not run in the background "taking care of the business" when you are not prompting them.
Funny you mention this because Opus 4.5 did this just yesterday. I accidentally gave it a task with conflicting goals, and after working through it for a few minutes it realized what was going on, summarized the conflict and asked me which goal should be prioritized, along with detailed pros and cons of each approach. It’s exactly how I would expect a mid level developer to operate, except much faster and more thorough.