Founders are done hiring junior engineers. They are not slowing down, they are done.

“The true magic of this broken world lay in the ability of things it contained to vanish, to become so thoroughly lost, that they might never have existed in the first place.”

The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay [2000].

Eugenia Kuyda built Replika into one of the most interesting AI companies of the last decade and says AI coding tools changed her hiring calculus entirely. Other founders have been stating different versions of this. But what’s actually happening is that work that used to justify a junior hire, like support tickets, bug fixes, and scaffolding work, is now completed mostly by AI.

Senior engineers with good AI tooling are doing what used to take a team. So the talent pipeline isn’t just disrupted, it’s broken. And that creates a real problem nobody is willing to discuss candidly.

Junior roles were never just about output. They were how the industry trained the next generation of senior engineers. You learned by doing the work. By making the mistakes. By having someone senior catch you and explain why. If we skip that rung entirely, where do the senior engineers of 2032 come from?

It is the question worth sitting with. Not whether AI can code or not, because it clearly can. But what is the Tech industry giving up when it eliminates the minor league teams that feed the majors?