Top upvoted comment just tore a big fat hole into the entire argument and I have to say, good for the comments section. That's so rare.

One open question here is whether we’re seeing youth employment decrease because AI is effectively replacing entry level workers in these fields, or because executives wrongly think AI can or will soon be able to do so?

You have to assume that if anybody puts a hiring freeze for junior employees right now it'd be out of some combination of caution, hype and insecurity about the economic landscape thanks to the usual suspects.

Turns out if the discussion is "quantitatively rich" but is ignoring the obvious qualitative observation it may end up flip-flopping a bunch. I'm not sure I'm as excited about that as the author, because man, is that a constant of the modern corporate world and does it suck and cost people money and stress.

I fail to see how AI can replace any given entry-level SE

You don't "get it"?

AI is making senior software engineers more productive so they don’t need to hire more devs

Yes, I think you do.

I largely look at this as leadership using AI hype as an excuse to cut staff regardless of actual productivity. The house of cards hasn't come down quite yet.

There’s a growing wisdom gap coming in America. The people who are already well versed in company practices and culture are going to use AI to complete the tasks that they would have otherwise given to assistants and junior resources.

Counterpoint: no, they are not. Not with the current path of tech progress on the field, at least.

Because seniors well versed in company practices and culture will get tired of having to manually redo junior work corrections really quick, and we are nowhere close to closing the error correction needs at this point.

Repetitive work that could feasibly have been automated or removed already? Maybe. There was a TON of room for automation that people weren't investing on doing and the AI gold rush will feasibly take advantage of some of that. But AI replacing junior jobs wholesale? Nah. The tech isn't there.

Yes, I do, because we are many and we persevere.

Here we are celebrating Labor Day, the day that celebrates workers rights - overtime pay for working over 40 hours, limiting children from having to work in factories, weekends and time off.

It was a hard fight from serfdom to poor factory conditions to now. We stand on the shoulders of giants.

It's doesnt have to work, it just has to be convincing enough to get the bean counters and/or incompetent/sociopathic upper management to buy in to the idea that they can save money.

Same as always, if the shitstorm created by a decision isn't immediately devastating or can be incontrovertibly tied to said decision then that's just BAU.

but the time the shitshow starts playing the preroll trailers the golden parachutes and bonuses have been claimed.

For them, this isn't broken, this is how the game works.

Junior devs and sysadmins who do not much very useful stuff yet, but get some basic experience. And people whose main required traits are human voice and following script.

Transient processes are a thing, one can have plenty of middle and senior devs and sysadmins, with the economy not producing new ones anymore. So the employers are hiring those, and replacing juniors with AI. Whether that works I'm not sure.

So at some point the AI bubble will be over (at least in dev and sysadmin and such work), but there will be fewer developers, and there might eventually be a situation where there are fewer qualified developers in the economy overall. Which would give centralized corporate things a market advantage over smaller non-corporate things, due to cost of development growing after the fall happening now.

While for some not very qualified jobs humans won't be needed anymore - while that "AI" is expensive, it might really be, even after the bubble crash, more affordable than hiring a human (in a western country) for a bullshit job - except in everything I've read those bullshit jobs were treated as social responsibility to teach work ethic to growing generations, that weird mix of individualist and working class themes in books describing pre-Depression USA. Yes, individualism is important and being self-reliant is important, but even that protestant ethic wasn't about capitalism more than it was about dignity and hard work.

I think Silicon Valley is consciously playing Asimov's Foundation with our planet (seeding technologies affecting humanity's development by some schedule with expected global results), except where Asimov's Foundation was about preserving knowledge and civilization, they are moving in the opposite direction. That is, they may not understand it. They may think they are building that sci-fi empire the Foundation begins with. But in actuality they are breaking concrete and steel things that work and replace them with paper huts kinda resembling something that would work better. Metaphorically.

They don't understand what an empire is, neither the "mandate of heaven" kind nor the "unity of civilization" kind (heck, even the Soviet covertly Christian "building the city of sun" kind, like in Vysotsky's song - "... но сады сторожат и стреляют без промаха в лоб"). You don't build an empire by burning libraries and poisoning discourses, you also don't build an empire by making every its citizen uncertain whether they are a free man or a slave (it's a common misconception to start an attempt at an empire from points where previous empires failed ; that state is usually expected to fail again for the same reasons).

as a consultant/freelancer dev whose entire workload for the past year has been cleaning up AI slop, no with dev it hasn't been what I would say a smooth or even good implementation. for my wallet? been a fantastic implementation, for everyone else? not so much.

The thing is as a TOOL it's great depending on the model. As a rubber duck? fantastic. As something that the majority of companies have utilized with vibe coding to build something end to end? no, it's horrible. It can't scale anything, implements exploits left right and center, and unlike junior devs doesn't learn anything. If you don't hold its hand during a build then it'll quickly go off the rails. It'll implement old APIs or libraries or whatever simply because those things have the most documentation attached to it.

An example. a few weeks ago a client wanted to set up a private git instance with Forgejo. They had Claude Code set it up for them. the problem? Claude went with Forgejo 1.20. ForgeJo is currently on 12.0. MASSIVE security hole right there. Why did Claude do that? 1.20 had more documentation as opposed to 12.0. And when I say "documentation" I could simply be referring to blog posts, articles, whatever that talked about it more than the latest version because The LLM's will leverage that stuff when making decisions for builds. You also see it if you want something in Rust+Smithy. Majority of the time the AI will go for a very outdated version of Smithy because that's what a lot of people talked about at one point. So you're generating massive tech debt before even throwing something into production.

Now like I said as a tool? a problem solver for a function you can't figure out? it's great. the issue is like I said companies aren't seeing it as a tool, they're seeing it as a cost saving replacement for a living human being which it is not. It's like replacing construction worker with a hammer attached to a drone and then wondering why your house frame keeps falling over.