AI has torched the market for junior programmers

In early 2025 I predicted that AI will create many, many more programmers, and that new programming jobs would look different. In March I checked in and found startups substituting compute for labor at record rates, with the wave of new jobs nowhere in sight. This post is the next check-in, and I have good news and bad news. The bad news: AI has torched the market for junior programmers. The good news: the long tail of new programmers I predicted has materialized, but with a big twist: they don't call themselves programmers. Let me show you the data, and see if you believe me. The market for young programmers has collapsed Here's the single most important chart about AI and programming jobs, built from ADP payroll data by Stanford's Digital Economy Lab. It tracks employment of US software developers by age, indexed to October 2022: Developers aged 22 to 25 are down 19% from their late-2022 peak. Every cohort over 30 grew over the same period, with 41-to-49-year-olds up 14%. This isn't…