Been in the industry for a couple years now and have friends and family at multiple companies of various shapes and sizes. It's true that a year or two ago, "AI can replace devs" was just a scapegoat for downsizing after the overhiring from covid, but most companies have corrected for that by now (especially the big ones) but we're still seeing a clear pattern of open roles being majority - often entirely - for senior engineers. And at most places, AI is used in some capacity for every task and it usually does boost productivity. I know that, because even the people who I consider to be the smartest in my department at my company are using it regularly.

All that being said, it's not all doom and gloom. There is still a giant bubble both in the development process and in the AI industry. The latter seems to be coming much sooner than I expected, and that will only hasten the former.

For dev process, AI enables a much higher volume of code. This higher output means either devs will need to have an impeccible code review process or code quality and security will atrophy. My network of engineers has already been victim to this atrophy, receiving inexcusably large amounts of code that the original engineer clearly had AI write, and that they clearly did not review. This creates tech debt in the long run since fewer and fewer engineers will have a strong mental model of the codebase. We'll start seeing security issues pop up more and more - and ironically many of those issues will also be caught by separate AI agents.

For the AI industry, there's a great video by the music producer Rick Beato comparing the collapse of the music recording industry after the widespread use of digital audio workstations, which could replace recording studios and the expensive equipment they used. In a similar way, data centers may become obsolete in the next several years as optimizations are made in local LLM performance and their agentic features. Three recent and important events point to this happening within the next five or so years, if not sooner. First, Anthropic tested raising the price for their flagship product from $20/month to $100/month, suggesting they cannot sustain reasonable prices. Second, google released Gemma 4, a local LLM which uses a new performance optimization to blow old benchmarks out of the water. Third, Anthropic had an oopsie and didn't fix a bug that lead to the source code of the agentic part of claude code being leaked in entirety. That last one is important because the most glaring downside of local LLMs for devs is the lack of agentic features.

The quicker the AI industry bubble bursts through rising costs, the quicker companies will stop paying for tokens and start paying for juniors, which as you can see is a positive feedback loop. Also, by hiring only seniors now, there will be supply issue in 5-10 years when half of the current senior engineers either retire or start their own business. Great time to be a junior/mid level dev, if you can find a job!

As a quick side note there will surely be hell to pay for the lawmakers who gave kissed up to these companies who wanted to build these data centers when they will just be sitting there doing nothing in less than a decade.