Entry-level software engineering postings dropped 67% between 2023 and 2024. The pipeline that turns students into engineers is collapsing.

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.

  • Merlin@lemmy.zip
    5·
    18 hours ago

    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

    • ell1e@leminal.spaceEnglish
      1·
      13 hours ago

      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.

      • Merlin@lemmy.zip
        1·
        4 hours ago

        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