The data is brutal for juniors

Stanford's Digital Economy Lab tracked US software developer employment by age using ADP payroll data, indexed to October 2022. Developers aged 22-25 are down 19% from their late-2022 peak. Every cohort over 30 grew over the same period — 41-to-49-year-olds are up 14%. After controlling for firm-level shocks and interest rate exposure, the Stanford team still finds a 16% relative employment decline for young workers in AI-exposed jobs.

Entry-level software postings are down 28% from their 2022 peaks. Computer science graduates now have a 6.1% unemployment rate, higher than liberal arts majors — a sentence that would have gotten you laughed out of any career counseling office in 2019.

The timing points to agentic AI

The junior line doesn't fall off a cliff when ChatGPT launches. It peaks a couple of months before, drifts down through 2023, and then deteriorates fastest in 2024 and early 2025 — which is when coding assistants stopped autocompleting lines and started completing tickets. Agentic programming is what really turned up the heat, not ChatGPT.

Other suspects exist: the ZIRP unwind, Section 174 tax change, and post-pandemic hiring correction. Only about 4.5% of 2025's announced layoffs were attributed to AI by the companies doing the laying off. But the Stanford results survive controls for firm-level shocks and interest rate exposure, and none of those confounders explain why the damage is so precisely concentrated among 22-to-25-year-olds in AI-automatable occupations while their 40-year-old colleagues thrive.

Aggregate numbers hide the carnage

Total US employment grew 0.8% from May 2024 to May 2025. Computer and mathematical occupations grew 1.3%, faster than the economy. The count of employed software developers went from 1.53 million in May 2022 to 1.69 million in May 2025, up 10% right through the AI era. Studies in the US, Denmark, and by Anthropic itself find no relationship between AI exposure and aggregate employment.

How can both be true? Weight the age bands by their share of the workforce. Total developer employment is up 4.4% since October 2022. Juniors (by age) are only about 8% of the developer workforce, so a catastrophe for them barely moves the average. Every study that looks at averages finds nothing; every study that looks at juniors finds carnage.

Specific job titles are dying

Same BLS data, May 2024 to May 2025: "computer programmer" (people who write code to someone else's specification) fell 16% in a single year. The BLS had projected that occupation to decline 6% per decade. Web developers fell 11%, and QA testers 6.5%. Meanwhile data scientists grew 12%, systems analysts 4.4%, and the broad "software developer" category grew 2%. The jobs disappearing are the ones where the work product is code written to spec. The jobs growing are the ones where the work product is judgment about what code should exist.

The long tail materialized — without the title

GitHub added 36 million new accounts in the last Octoverse year, its fastest growth ever — more than one new developer per second — and 121 million new repositories, the biggest year for repository creation. Eighty percent of those new arrivals used Copilot within their first week.

App Store submissions declined for eight consecutive years after peaking in 2016. In 2025 they grew 24%, the first real growth since the peak, and in Q1 2026 iOS submissions were up 80% year over year. The surge is so large that Apple's review times have stretched from two days to weeks. The category mix shifted toward productivity, utilities, and lifestyle apps — exactly what you'd expect from first-timers solving their own problems rather than studios chasing game revenue.

According to Vercel, 63% of vibe-coding users are non-developers. Lovable says 60% of its users are "non-developers", and its users create over 100,000 new projects every day. Replit claims 50 million people have used its platform. These are marketers, founders, teachers, analysts, and product managers — they are writing software, but they don't identify as developers.

The apprenticeship pipeline is broken

The career on-ramp used to work like this: you got hired to write mediocre code, a senior engineer reviewed it, you slowly absorbed judgment through repetition and correction, and a decade later you were the senior engineer. That chain is now broken. AI writes the mediocre code, so nobody hires the junior developer, so nobody is in the queue to become the senior who reviews things.

Meanwhile millions of new builders are shipping with no one reviewing anything. A Veracode study found 45% of AI-generated code fails basic OWASP security tests. An audit of vibe-coded apps found 10% with critical row-level security flaws exposing user data. Apple is drowning in submissions it can't review fast enough.

Green shoots and possible correction

IBM is tripling entry-level hiring on the theory that AI-equipped juniors can do formerly senior work, redesigning the junior role around customer contact and specification rather than typing. But Salesforce hired zero engineers last fiscal year. Indeed's postings data bottomed in May 2025 and has risen for thirteen straight months, up 10% year over year. If the 22-to-25 employment line turns upwards in Stanford's next update, it may be that the market has found a new equilibrium.

We are not watching the death of programming. We are watching programming stop being a job title and become a capability, the same way "typist" stopped being a job title when it became a thing everyone was expected to know. The people who were about to start climbing the old ladder when we set it on fire are the ones we owe a new ladder.