Reality of Today in the Job Market
I have gone through a lot over the last month. Currently I am dealing with job hunting, and honestly,...
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the job market right now is a total grind — vibe coding feels like the only way to stay afloat without burning out. i'm leaning into cursor for my own builds because grinding out syntax is the last thing i want to do after a long day. fundamentals still keep the ship upright but speed is the only thing that gets you noticed. austin taught me: just start the thing.
Yes, how much you ship has become important more than ever. We gotta keep going and learning quickly.
“Vibe coding” works until it hits real constraints—security, edge cases, and maintainability. The market is clearly rewarding generalists who can leverage AI, but fundamentals still decide whether the output is usable or fragile.
Treating AI as a force multiplier rather than a replacement feels like the only sustainable approach right now.
Between the .env files and Objective oriented... it's amazing how low the perceived barrier to entry is to be "a coder" nowadays. The pendulum has to swing back, at least a little, after folks realize the negative impact of these current prolific decisions.
bar is at all time low
this is gang
🤣🤣
You mean gyan 😁
no
Good points ... let me just say, "rumors of the demise of the Developer are greatly exaggerated" :-)
Nice
That is not how real engineering works.
That is how LinkedIn cosplay engineering works.
As a builder and a founder:
If the architecture is unsafe, the product is unsafe.
If the product is unsafe, the vendor is unsafe.
If the vendor is unsafe, the relationship is over.
This hit. Especially the “vibe-safe vs vibe-unsafe” distinction — that’s exactly the line most people blur right now.
For me, I don’t really treat AI as something that writes code for me — it’s more like a system I interrogate while I’m building. Every time it outputs something, I start breaking it down:
I basically turn the code into a set of questions first. Then I take those questions and run them back as a separate prompt — almost like creating an external reviewer that’s not attached to the original output.
And the key part: I don’t regenerate the same thing. I generate something adjacent. Closest possible structure, different implementation. That’s where the real signal shows up — patterns, inconsistencies, hidden shortcuts.
That’s how I learn while building instead of just shipping.
Because yeah… calling an API and wiring things together isn’t the same as understanding a system. If you don’t review the assumptions, constraints, and failure paths, you’re basically just prompt-engineering your way into blind spots.
AI is powerful, no doubt. But if you’re not slowing down at the core logic and architecture layer, you’re not speeding up — you’re just deferring problems to production 😅
Your market read holds up. The twist HR postings don't see yet: they lag 6-12 months behind what's actually shipping, so half the "fundamentals" they still fear (leaked .env files, for example) are handled autonomously now by tools like Claude Code without the dev even noticing. Dev competence stays an asset, but standing on it alone is a losing bet as business standards shift fast. The real play is to master, not just use, the tools reshaping the work like Claude Code or Cursor. Mastery compounds, familiarity doesn't.
That’ s harsh reality. Businesses won’t care and they focus on speed more. But I think developers who truly understand what’s happening and are actively adopting these tools will come out on top.
Businesses won’t care, until they get bitten in the *ss by production bugs, vulnerabilities and unmaintainable software - I think companies will find out in the end, and will understand that sometimes going slower means going faster in the long run ...
We don’t need to wait a lot, it is going to happen in near future.
Frankly speaking, the emergence of AI has made the work of developers less important, which is a fact we must accept.
I'd partially agree, boilerplate code is gone, and simple static sites are trivial to generate with AI. But maintaining complex software is still in high demand, the shift is that we need to adopt new tools and exercise our own judgment.
Is that so? And why 'must' we accept that, or more to the point, what exactly do we need to accept?
I'll readily admit that simple projects (basic websites etc) may not even need a developer anymore - end users/business people will be able (or are already able) to "vibe code" those - I agree that THAT is a reality that we'll need to accept ...
For anything more complex, I'd argue that devs are still needed, if only because someone has to guide the tools (features, specs, architecture), and has to check the output generated by AI - correctness, performance, security ...
Saying that the work of developers is less important is akin to saying that the work of a carpenter is less important because he's using an electric saw instead of a hand saw - at least, that's how I see AI - as a tool which still needs a knowledgeable person to use it effectively ...
I totally agree. It is cool to use AI as a tool if you know what you’re doing. When the codebase gets larger and if a developer doesn’t know how the system works, slop creation is increasing. Therefore slowing down makes sense.
fundamentals matter more when AI writes the code. you can ship without knowing why it works, until you cannot.
I agree, fundamentals are very important
yeah - debugging is where it becomes undeniable. you can't fix what you can't reason about.