Every day, I see the same headline: "AI is coming for the entry-level jobs."
As someone currently deep in the "learning phase," it’s easy to feel like we’re studying for a profession that won't exist in three years. But after spending months building local-first AI tools in a resource-constrained environment, I’ve realized something:
The "Junior Developer" isn't being replaced by AI. They are being replaced by developers who only know how to copy-paste from AI.
- The "Prompt Monkey" Trap
If your entire value as a developer is knowing how to ask ChatGPT for a React component, you are in the "Mariana Trench" of career risk. Why? Because the company doesn't need you to do that; the Senior Dev can do that in 5 seconds.
2. The Pivot: Shift from "Syntax" to "Systems"
AI is a god at syntax (writing the code), but it’s still a toddler at systems (understanding the why).
To survive, we have to stop being "Coders" and start being "Engineers."
Coders worry about how to write a loop.
Engineers worry about how that loop impacts battery life on a low-end device, or how it handles 57x network latency variance.
3. Build "Un-Googleable" Projects
If you want to get hired (or get into a top school), stop building To-Do apps and Weather apps. AI has solved those a million times.
Build something weird. Build something that solves a problem in your physical world.
Build a tool that works offline because your internet is trash.
Build a language that uses local slang because your friends find English intimidating.
Build something that requires you to get your hands dirty with hardware constraints.
4. The "Hacker" Advantage
The next generation of "Greats" won't be the ones with the best prompts. They will be the ones who understand what happens when the prompt fails. They will be the "Scrappy" ones who can debug a kernel panic at 2 AM when the power is out.
Don't fear the LLM. Use it to automate the boring stuff so you can focus on the hard stuff. The future belongs to the ones who aren't afraid of the risk, because they’ve mastered the machine.
Top comments (2)
I have an interesting story related to this same issue; so the startup I work at rn, it's just me and the founder for the tech part of it (tech is a small piece of the pie).
And the whole codebase is written by him in 2-3 weeks before I even joined with Claude Opus 4.5, and the fun part is that he is from a commerce+IT background. He recently joked to friends that my main job is "knowing where to look when it breaks"... and I'm there just enjoying my food, like of course how else can you work with AI if you can't do that.
This guy has a greener github than most of the devs i know, I tell him only if I could afford claude i would have had 10x my current commit history, but then again the more you rely on it the harder it becomes to untangle and solve the issue later on. Which is why I'm so scared to touch that vast codebase of this app man.
That's an interesting thing you shared and yeah it's true AI isn't all give prompts and make things...it's more like move fast and break things....that guy surely must be having code for breakfast or smth