this post was submitted on 23 Feb 2026
99 points (91.6% liked)

Programming

25740 readers
495 users here now

Welcome to the main community in programming.dev! Feel free to post anything relating to programming here!

Cross posting is strongly encouraged in the instance. If you feel your post or another person's post makes sense in another community cross post into it.

Hope you enjoy the instance!

Rules

Rules

  • Follow the programming.dev instance rules
  • Keep content related to programming in some way
  • If you're posting long videos try to add in some form of tldr for those who don't want to watch videos

Wormhole

Follow the wormhole through a path of communities !webdev@programming.dev



founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
 

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.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] Bob_Robertson_IX@discuss.tchncs.de 9 points 13 hours ago (4 children)

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.

[–] sobchak@programming.dev 2 points 47 minutes ago

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.

[–] VitoRobles@lemmy.today 13 points 12 hours ago

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.

[–] belated_frog_pants@beehaw.org 3 points 12 hours ago

The price to pay is already happening with companies having more and more outages so

[–] BestBouclettes@jlai.lu 0 points 10 hours ago* (last edited 10 hours ago)

Especially when a good senior dev with a good grasp of AI can do wonders.