If it were 2018, I personally would have made 3 SWE hires in the last 12 months. The reason I didn't need to is because of LLMs. Not budget, not anything else. I don't think AI is so much to blame for layoffs, but I do think it is a huge component of the slow hiring. There's just less demand for coders.
I was the first dev at my current company to experiment with Claude Code back when it first came out. Some of my coworkers tried it, and some didn’t like it at all.
But now literally all of us are using it. The company gives us a $100 monthly stipend for it. We’re a small dev team, but our CEO is thrilled. He keeps bragging about how customers are gobsmacked by how quickly we’re delivering new features and he’s been asked if we’ve made a ton of hires in the last year. We’re actually down two developers from when I started.
I don’t love the code it writes, but the speed is unbeatable. We still need devs, and I don’t think that’s ever going to change. But we don’t need as many devs. We’re shipping like crazy with a small team. I don’t think more people would speed us up much at all.
Where I work, we hired a developer that was supposed to be familiar with SQL. It turns out, he can't even write simple queries (and spends 0 time outside of work getting up to speed).
The director purchased a subscription to Claude and will most likely get rid of him at the beginning of the new year, because the job can pretty much be automated at this point.
Many Marketing/copyrighting people have also been laid off over the last year due to the same reasons.
"I don’t love the code it writes, but the speed is unbeatable. We still need devs"
I think this will be the problem going forward: Less positions to fill and the same amount of potential candidates. You will need to have more experience and credentials to compete.
This is what I'm seeing in the design market. With Figma Make, you can write a prompt, tell it to use your design library, generate a flow, and then hand it off to developers and say "Hey, look at this, can you implement this?". Alternatively, you can use Cursor/Claude Code/Codex to pull in Figma design system elements via MCP, and generate flows that way. You can push features so much faster with the same or fewer people, and lets be honest, pushing more features in less time is the #1 metric at a lot of companies even if they claim otherwise.
I find it to be sometimes easier to utilize my Figma library to design what I want as I generally don't have to do rework. It gets annoying after awhile to waste tokens and context dealing with stupid small things like "Hey, the icon in the icon button is wrong." if you do prompting. Pulling in the same icon & icon button through a MCP is generally easier.
Presumably you can iterate on and manually tweak the design first, which is much quicker and less cumbersome than iterating on and tweaking the design when it's in clunky HTML/CSS/JS form and all the non-vector graphical assets are flattened/cropped etc.
I own a small agency and it’s the same for me, but that doesn’t explain the urgency nor the layoffs in the big companies. Yes we are not hiring juniors, but we still hire seniors because they are now more productive. That’s not what we are seeing in big companies.
To me it’s the cumulated effects of many things happening coincidentally:
- Massive offshoring
- Money becoming scarce after the ZIRP era and in the recession except for AI investments
- Near monopoly positions that allow layoffs as a strategy to push stock price, without penalty for the decline in quality (enshittification)
- Cherry on the top, LLMs being able to do the work of juniors when used by seniors
If it was only about AI productivity we wouldn’t see this urgency.
It's almost worse than this, in that IME LLMs also made junior devs worse. They want to use LLMs, and why not, it's the tech du jour, but then they lack the judgment to produce good LLM code.
So as LLMs are getting better, junior devs aregetting worse.
It feels to me like everyone is holding their breath to see how the wholesale "AI can replace people" notion pans out. Whether it proves true or not, betting on the wrong result will hit hard so few want to go all in (outside of the companies that produce the tech itself). If there's anything "AI" has been able to ship at scale, it's uncertainty.
My take is that AI adoption is a gear shift to a higher level abstraction, not a replacement. So we will have a lull, then a return to hiring for situations just like this. Maybe there is a lot more runway for AI to take jerbs, but I think it will hit an equilibrium of "creating different jobs" at some point.
