My Honest Thoughts on AI and the Job Market in 2026 (No Hype)

To anyone watching this, just don't stress over things that are outside of your control. just do what you can that's within your control, everything else is noise

I can't wait how companies will wonder where all the senior developers went, after they didn't hire juniors for the last 20 years...

Someone who genuinely loves to code would not love to see this happen. It's true that u can build faster. It's true that people can just prompt and get the output they want... but that's also the sad part for people who love to code to seeing their skills being almost obsolete. I'm one of the them, and im really trying my best to adapt to AI, but at the same time i feel sad about it.

Guys there is literally an ad for an AI coding tool less than three minutes into the video, don’t take this too seriously. It’s obvious where this guy’s motivations are and that his sponsors influence what he says

My problem with what you're saying is that you're advertising "no hype", but then you go on to measure productivity in terms of code output, talk about ridiculous timelines in tech, talk as if the "skills" of using "agentic" LLM's are actually at all difficult for technical people to pick up quickly. I'll take each of these points in turn: 1. Code output is notoriously a horrendous metric for the health and efficiency of a codebase. 2. You say, "If you're not someone like that and you spend even, you know, a month disconnected from your computer, looking at the news sites for the next AI model, you're just already behind." But if we look at the openclaw (or clawd bot or molt bot or whatever stupid thing it is now) what would change if you took that month away. Literally nothing happened except a slop product ensloppified and now no one cares about that slop product anymore except the niche. That's fear mongering. That's not "No hype" as you say. 3. It takes very little effort to start using an LLM harness. There's a million of them. There are a million techniques from skills to MCP to whatever that all exist in the harness. If you give a technical person access to it and they're motivated to learn it, the "skill gap" isn't that wide. It will take a maximum of 1 week for someone who's legitimately cracked at SWE as an old head to get really good with "agentic" tools. This also seems like fear mongering. Here's my experience: They produce a lot of trash if you're not guiding them extensively. Not a little trash. A lot of utter nonsense. If you're not guiding the models in a very particular fashion, a fashion that you know works for your work flow, it will produce slop. For crissake, it's bizarre that anyone puts that much stock in something that still to this day the underlying models can't count characters. It is impressive how many problems can be boiled down to next token prediction, I agree. In fact, it surprised everyone how many problems it can solve. But let's not get it twisted. You are an influencer. You benefit from the hype. Coding is completely tangential to you at this stage in your career. No one should assume a lack of bias in your take especially when you have clearly demonstrated the opposite.

So many things you have to learn and do at the same time to land a job, it's insane.

43 years of computer programming. Being a really good developer used to be job security. Now its doom.

New developers generating a huge amount of code are not "massively productive", they're likely going to create a huge mess that someone else is going to have to clean up later. The tools are still tools, they'll do what you tell them to without judgement of what will be better in the long term

The biggest problem right now is burnout from trying to keep up. Before AI, we had time to actually learn new technology. Now, there's a major update every week, and you have to spend your free time after work studying just to stay relevant. The new features are incredible, but being stuck in an endless loop of trying not to fall behind is incredibly stressful.

You’re absolutely right. I have 15 years of experience in QA Automation and SDET roles, and I can’t even get past AI resume screening to land an interview. Two years ago recruiters were reaching out to me without me even sending my resume anywhere. Even though I keep up with the latest AI tools, nobody seems to care. The market has changed dramatically.