I do some work with the co-founder of a 50-person company in the Bay Area. Their focus is security, not AI, so I asked how her business has changed as a result of AI. “We’re not hiring junior people anymore; Claude is our junior developers,” she responded. “It’s bad for society, but it’s good for us. We still need to do code and structure review, but Claude is doing the coding that computer science graduates used to do.” If all that is needed is some prompting, why not fire the expensive senior people and replace them with inexpensive “AI-first” young people? “The more senior people are much better at crafting prompts and using Claude,” she answered.
Could the “bad for society” problem be addressed without simply doubling the percentage of the U.S. population that is already paid to relax at home? (“the Bernie/AOC Plan”) We could revise the education system to make better use of the 17+ years (K-12 plus the inevitable useless 4-year college degree that takes 5-6 years for most). I think every study has shown that college-age students learn more in project-based classes. Maybe the same is true for K-12, but we’ve never had been enough teachers to supervise/coach. AI can now be both the tool that students are learning to use and the coach that teaches them how to use AI. The $50,000/year private school from Austin, Texas, Alpha School, seems to be an example of this. With the help of AI, legacy topics are crammed into 2 hours per day. The rest of the school day is for projects. Here’s how it previews in Telegram:
($50,000/year per student sounds like a lot, but of course it is less than New York City taxpayers spend, especially if you fold in the true cost of real estate, health care, pensions, etc.)
The 17+ years of formal education can, essentially, become practice for using AI as a mid-level or senior employee in an enterprise.
Separately, am I forever stuck with the “uncool” label because I’m still on ChatGPT and Astra? I use it more to maintain code and do sysadmin than to write entirely new code.
The New York Times recently ran a story suggesting that the above anecdote isn’t anecdotal… “Not Even Tech’s Safest Jobs Look So Safe Anymore” (November 6, 2026):
(Note how tech workers being fired due to uselessness appear to be white in the NYT’s depiction? A stark contrast to how illustrators in our media depict the smart tech workers! I guess it is consistent with the Alpha School web page preview. The person who knows how to do stuff is Black. The white child being assisted may or may not ever learn Black ways of knowing.)
phil . I still cannot believe you work with a company based out of liberal heaven state of CA and contribute(with your intellect) to their economy. Based on your blog posts, you abhor those states. When are you going to cut of ties with these states. TN and AL still RED , just saying…. Reg. AI, my company also stopped hiring junior devs, in last two years no one wrote a single line of code except Claude. We develop internal business applications and the senior devs have business process knowledge that makes them better AI prompters.