- cross-posted to:
- programming@programming.dev
- cross-posted to:
- programming@programming.dev
AI coding tools are replacing entry-level programming jobs faster than anyone predicted. The traditional path from junior to senior developer is collapsing, and the consequences for the entire industry could be devastating. If you mentor juniors or hire them, this one hits different.
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Why don’t universities just offer courses where you graduate as senior dev?
Are they stupid?Why don’t universities just offer courses where you graduate as senior dev?
This exists, but it isn’t easy to gather expert levels of programming experience willing to work for a teacher’s salary. So your mileage may vary.
So I recently started contributing a little to FOSS projects and and in just a few months, I ended up learning more than I learned in over a year of “industry experience”.
The variance is high in this one.
The variance is high in this one.
Absolutely.
Eating your seed corn? One good meal then a permenant famine is enough for CEOs to raise valuations and investors to pump and dump the stock. The famine is someone else’s problem. It’s exactly what the market rewards.
Tbh from my experiences, AI is also turning current senior devs into juniors. The skill erosion is real, and I could see it on myself just after a week of trying out Claude (since we’ve gotten access at my job).
The skills I’ve spent a great part of my life acquiring are really not worth whatever advantages AI use may have, even if I just did my job to earn a paycheck and didn’t care about the quality of my output, as long as it’s acceptable. It may feel easier now, but eventually you will have to pass another interview, and good luck when the last time you actually coded without AI was a year ago.
The skill erosion is real, and I could see it on myself just after a week of trying out Claude
While it took me a few months to really notice it, that still shocked me. Using AI extensively makes you depend on it - and that’s exactly what the big players want. A customer paying a recurring subscription just to do their job.
Since I am not forced to use it, I deleted my OpenAI account and started to code without LLM assistance again. It’s much more fun to solve problems by myself (and get a dopamine kick out of that) anyway - and when the bubble inevitably pops, I can still go on as I did before.
A customer paying a recurring subscription just to do their job.
Local models will win. They’re half-assed, but the big boys only provide fractionally more ass. LLMs will become just another tool you can call on when you’d rather read code than write it.
I really hope so, but for that to happen, hardware prices have to go down again and that might take a while.
The fuck are people downvoting for? 8 GB and no CUDA is sufficient for a variety of LLMs. That comparison’s from a year and a half ago, which is forever in this industry, but it’s not like small models got worse.
This mildly terrible website shows Min Istral 3B benchmarking above state-of-the-art DeepSeek R1 32B from ten months prior. And also above the 72B version of Qwen 2.5, whose 3B version was top-of-the-list for the ItsFoss guy.
A Raspberry Pi can run local models. You don’t need 64 gigs and a 5090.
I’m with you, stuck at a billion dollar software company with an AI fetish. It’s a great search tool, can write some decent unit tests. But God help you if you let it write production code, for any of the “you won’t find this on stackexchange” stuff we all work on.
It’s creating this state of mind which is going to kill everything. I was coding a website for fun on the weekend and streaming for one of my friends to see how some stuff works. Every other fucking person that joined the call opened with “I see you are vibe coding a website” when they could visibly see that i was not logged into coopilot, i was using VS on my gaming PC like a chump. These are all CS people and now everything defaults to using an LLM. We are doomed as a whole.
If you believe the AI hype there won’t be any programming jobs soon - so those that do (believe) think they need to become highly-proficient AI-wranglers to maintain employability.
I too think it’s the wrong approach, but it’s hard to say what hirers will be looking for in the medium to long term, and devs whom adapt to ‘the new thing’ faster have typically been more hirable.
Personally hoping the big players crash and burn asap because the benefits just haven’t been anywhere near worth the costs across various domains.
This isn’t anything new. There have been multiple waves of “code-gen for normies”, and every time after the hype dies down there’s a heap of shitty code to fix.
There’s gonna be no shortage of customers up to their eyeballs in broken slop after the bill comes due and Anthropic has to stop subsidizing their prices. AI slop is the best thing to happen to our job security in a while. (Provided you retain your critical thinking skills.)
Fingers crossed for the crash sooner than later, because I’m tired of it all.
Reading articles like this crack me up, because so, so many devs were so incredibly smug while they coded their own demise with AI, repeatedly saying which “unskilled labor” would be replaced.
Turns out they played themselves.
Watching this sector in particular is extremely satisfying.
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I saw signs of reversal of this trend as companies realise that without junior developers they’ll soon find themselves without senior ones too.
It’s wild to me that companies think experienced professionals just grow on trees with all the experience already there.
Heather Doshay, head of people at SignalFire, told the New York Times: “Nobody has patience or time for hand-holding in this new environment, where a lot of the work can be done by A.I. autonomously.”
This is how they think. It’s not smart.
Head of people?
Can’t spell “resources.”
May not be human.
Honestly, I was surprised at how much hand-holding junior devs required.
Because, I didn’t really ask for a tenth of that.But it really just varies by person. There were enough people I knew during uni that decided and executed projects by themselves. For some reason, I just don’t meet similar ones at work.
The value of institutional knowledge is almost impossible to quantify and organizations are often totally inept at assessing the risks that come with losing it. Even if the risks are properly assessed and understood, the cost of mitigating them is immediate for a potential return on investment which is unknown.
I know from personal experience that getting an organization to mitigate these types of risks is usually an up hill battle. Even when the organization can easily afford it.
It’s easier to stick their heads in the sand and it goes way beyond just “white color” professionals. If you own a manufacturing plant, you could potentially lose a machinists annual salary, or more, in one hour of downtime. But I’ve seen at least a few large operations where the tool and die shop consists of one very overworked machinist. Management’s attitude is “oh, well we’ll just hire his replacement off the street whenever he finally decides to retire.”
The only problem with that is that the current guy has been there for 20 years, knows where ALL the bodies are buried, and has the skills to bring the plant back online with a welder and some scrap metal.
Even if the next person is really good at their job and magically shows up at the front door, it’s going to take them a while to get up to speed. That “while” costs money. In fact, it costs a lot of money. But there’s no way to reflect that on an income statement so nobody does anything about it.
What usually happens is some nepo-baby manager gets into an argument with the critical experienced employee. The employee gets “downsized” and his job is outsourced to a 3rd party.
Then they make it through a year without a major issue and the nepo-baby is promoted. 3 months later the completely avoidable catastrophe occurs and the nepo-baby claims “that didn’t happen on under my direction”. More scapegoats are laid-off or fired.
and because junior devs are going extinct, I am apparently also supposed to just shrivel up and die, I guess. I can’t convince my bosses that avoiding new code being written (they want us all in on low-code/no-code platforms) because junior devs straight up don’t know how to code anymore is a ticking time bomb.
If they don’t have the critical thinking skills to understand one screenful of code, how do they think they’ll actually fare when the same logic is split between 50 projects running in different environments, with undocumented tight coupling and no tool that can understand all of it at once (like an lsp server for code) with each line being on a different page hidden behind 30 mouse clicks?
Training juniors as if nothing happened will not provide you but the economy with seniors. You don’t own people.
Pay your seniors then. Changing jobs is a hassle. No one will do it if they are happy with their current job. Give them also work from home, so not even moving due to a partner will make the senior change jobs.
WFH (option to come to the office if they want). 4 day 8 hour work days. Flexible start/end times. At least 4 week paid holidays per year (mandatory). $100k+ salary.
Yes. But if you are the only one producing seniors their market value will increase to the extent where you cannot afford to keep them.
so you make them want to stay by actually treating them well
Can’t treat someone well enough while paying them peanuts.
If I were to get long-term WFH with enough salary to manage my own living, I might just delete my LinkedIn etc accounts.
Not looking to climb any corporate ladder. I know what I am good at and that’s what I apply for.
Until the bubble bursts. Then, we have lot’s of not-so-senior developers who don’t even know about code debt. Oh, wait, we have that already now.
It is the ecconomy, stupid. I realize junior engineers have never before had a recession affect them so this seems new and eifferent to them. However as a senior I’ve seen several and every single time there are articles about how this time is difierent and the jobs are never coming back. I also know it sucks to be someone who is affected, but in a few years this will be a memory.
not that ai changes nothing, but thingsialways change. The world recovers and moves on.
I agree. The article the article assumes that junior developers are tasked with doing tasks that senior devs will not (such as writing buggy boilerplate or something). That has not been the case with companies I worked at. When we hired a junior developer, we expected them to write the same code as everyone else, just that they would ask for help more often and would get more nit-picky code reviews. An AI could probably outdo a junior developer with a month or two of experience, but with a (junior) developer, the expectation is that if you take the time to explain to them why their code is wrong, they will never make the same mistake again.
I agree with you that it comes down to the state of the economy. Ten years ago, I was at a company that could not hire senior devs fast enough so we had to hire junior devs and mold them into the coders we needed.
Now I am at a company that has had a hiring freeze for several years. All new hires we are getting are back-fill: when we have someone quit, we can request a replacement. Anyone we hire needs to be able to hit the ground running and take over the previous employees responsibilities as soon as possible.
What I’ve been seeing is the opposite: companies are replacing most senior devs with junior prompters. At least 3 places where I have friends working have let go several of their more expensive senior developers and replaced them with cheaper junior developers who can use AI.
One department did that. The pro-Ai manager hired a bunch of juniors in 2024. I’m all about giving people opportunities. But what I didn’t know was they were all juniors who were vibe coders.
The whole team of like 30+ got fired during our summer 2025 layoffs.
Rumor has it none of the code was reusable and a new department inherited all of their responsibilities.
The whole team of like 30+ got fired during our summer 2025 layoffs.
You missed an important detail.
What happened to the pro-Ai manager??
And offshoring to vibe coders. Saw an article the other day about Indian Amazon devs (well, probably the managers) saying that being forced to use Amazon’s in-house models instead of Claude was hampering their productivity.
The price to pay is already happening with companies having more and more outages so
Especially when a good senior dev with a good grasp of AI can do wonders.
I doubt it. https://www.forbes.com/sites/corneliawalther/2025/06/09/intelligence-illusion-what-apples-ai-study-reveals-about-reasoning/ Gen AIs are literally so unable to have any basic logical thought, I think this is merely the hype.
To anybody still being scared, watch this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3400S4qMH6o
IBM article last week also said they were trippling down on hiring juniors.
I don’t really trust IBM to know what they’re doing, but it’s still a nice sign.
I’ve never seen LLM produced software that actually does what it’s supposed to. All this stupid crud slopware they are shoveling out produces no value and rarely works
i used to worry that the AI apocalypse would be something like skynet taking over and destroying everything on purpose…
Turns out it was just idiot managers shoving AI into critical infrastructure until they destroy everything on accident…
Similar effect but different causes.Self hosting posted a good example off a recent vibe coding security nightmare.
This is not the only effect. It is turning programming based jobs effectively into slavery. CEOs who buy into this hype are obsessed with producing 10 times more with half the work force. So mid level programmers, instead of coding (for most the fun part) spend most of their time checking AI code (for most the boring part) and at quantities probably 2-5x more than before.
It’ll backfire for any non-trivial code base at some point. LLM plagiarized code is just too inherently lacking any sense of big picture. Gen AI doesn’t have the necessary intelligence. I keep linking it but it keeps being relevant: https://www.forbes.com/sites/corneliawalther/2025/06/09/intelligence-illusion-what-apples-ai-study-reveals-about-reasoning/
Let’s start our own natural intelligence bubble
I want in. What are you making?
Thank god I got a job already
I have a job and no one forces me to use AI. Feels like an absolute dream right now.
Do you have an AI advocate?
Five years from now, AI will still need humans who understand what it cannot: why a system was built a certain way, what trade-offs were made, where the edge cases live that no training data covers.
Unless, perhaps, AI five years from now understands that too.
All of this current change has happened over fewer years than that. Hard to predict when it will slow back down again.
Unless, perhaps, AI five years from now understands that too.
LLMs have already hit a ceiling, the improvements between new model releases are pretty much negligible. They had to come up with very expensive agents checking the output to reduce hallucinations. The best example for that is GPT-5 from OpenAI, which was extremely underwhelming.
So. I’m a developer and I really dislike ai, am having pretty bad anxiety about the future because I’m also a bit older and I think pivoting to another career would be unlikely.
I started using agentic ai because there has been a massive push at work, with the usual talk saying that workers who use ai will replace workers who don’t
While I dread it and would love it to completely go away, I’ve been very surprised with the newer models like opus 4.6. The older gpt models were a bit “dumb” but opus feels different. Which makes me terrified of the future.
I really hope they hit a wall soon and don’t get any better than that
The lack of intelligence is inherent for LLMs: https://www.forbes.com/sites/corneliawalther/2025/06/09/intelligence-illusion-what-apples-ai-study-reveals-about-reasoning/
This is likely why Apple is the only big tech company that hasn’t entered the AI race with tons of debt and tons of data centers. They’re likely seeing the writing on the wall.
While there could be a new technique arriving to solve this some day, there also may never be one.
My concern is not the intelligence.
It’s good enough today to pattern match quite well and what we see as intelligence doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s what it need to replace most of us.
I tried copy pasting an issue today on copilot and it gave a solution and tests to me that worked.
I did very small adjustments to the code and I have to say the request wasn’t that well written and it was a slightly difficult thing to solve and it did “one shot” it. I just hate this so much. These newer models are definitely not fully replacing us but it did make me fix an issue much quicker than it takes me to run the unit tests.
I really hope that the Jevons paradox applies to this and well all have plenty of jobs after this solidifies and we find out their real limits. I just have daily dread about ai I hate that we’re going to increase even more the divide between the super rich and the rest, hopefully I’m being too negative or when governments lose all their tax revenue and people are about to revolt they’ll do something
I think most companies who replace junior coders with AI are coders are betting on that. If this really becomes the dominant approach but the bet fails, it is probably gonna take down whole lot of infrastructure with it making programming even more highly sought after skill. The other option is the bet will hold and classical programming will become mostly obselete, perhaps remaining mostly as an academic research topic.
