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Comment by pantsforbirds | Hacker News Reader

> AI is not replacing you or an education. AI is raising the bar of what you can comprehend and retain. From someone who is technically minded (and self-taught), all I have ever wanted is to keep learning.

AI is, in my opinion, absolutely murdering the junior dev market. It's now much more efficient to pay for a senior or staff engineer and set them up with a subscription to claude or codex. I think things are going to remain fine for senior+ engineers, but I genuinely don't know what advice I'd give to graduating devs at this time.

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Yep, and we have hard data on this: https://arstechnica.com/ai/2026/08/ai-is-hitting-entry-level...

> Stanford researchers find the employment trends they identified for entry-level workers last year are persisting and expanding. Specifically, employment levels for workers ages 22 to 25 in the most “AI-exposed” occupations are now 19 percent below those of their peers in fields less exposed to AI disruption.

I agree with the caveat that a lot of "seniors" (in name only) will be discarded as well. Title inflation finally comes back go bite people.

Being a senior engineer doesn't really have anything to do with how long you've been developing. I've met amazing 21 year old developers who can out code people doing this for 20+ years in their sleep. I would say one of the reasons "seniors" are so much better with AI is because they have CS fundamentals. They know what to ask, they know systems design, they know what ACID is, they understand race conditions...

AI + CS allows you to develop with leverage I've never seen before.

> who can out code people doing this for 20+ years

zero context for the work, so .. javascript?

Yeah. This is absolutely not the case when I worked on control systems, cryptography, or anything else that isn’t a CRUD saas.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/There_are_unknown_unknowns

One of the things that comes with experience is more things moving from your personal unknown unknowns bucket to your personal known knowns and known unknowns buckets.

It's notable that you said "out code" not "out engineer".

If you're desperate to discredit the substance of the comment with pedantic word games, sure. What they are describing sounds like engineering to me.

The substance is hard to see through the conflation of CS and software engineering. Do you actually believe that all there is to software engineering is CS fundamentals?

> I've met amazing 21 year old developers who can out code people doing this for 20+ years in their sleep.

yeah that's only true when you compare the top 10% of the 21-years-olds with the bottom 10% of the 51-years-old.

it's technically true but also bs.

(the "10" in "10%" is a made up number, but the point stands)

If you make it far enough in the interview process to interview with someone technical, then this probably doesn't matter. If you get filtered out by the resume or HR stages, then I'm not sure how much it even helps you.

> It's now much more efficient to pay for a senior or staff engineer and set them up with a subscription to claude or codex.

this has been happening for years though. just think of cloud computing and things like kubernetes: a single person or a small team can handle the amount of computer that twenty years ago required a full team of sysadmins, a facility (either on premise or datacenter space), huge (upfront!) capital expenditure and ongoing costs (connectivity and power).

same goes for web frameworks (think rails and similar)

Ok, but all of these technologies have bounded impact, and they present new abstractions that need to be learned by engineers.

Coding agents are different in that they are unbounded in the tasks they can do (although reliability is an issue), and you can work with them the same way you work with other engineers (e.g. via natural language).

Also, coding agent capabilities are advancing much faster than people can sit down and learn their limitations. All the tricks we learned for Opus 5 became obsolete in a couple months with Opus 5.5.

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