- 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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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 price to pay is already happening with companies having more and more outages so
Let’s start our own natural intelligence bubble
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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