WASHINGTON (UNITED STATES) - When Eric Lauer needs to hire at Giftory, the online gift-giving platform he runs, he's no longer looking for eager young coders fresh out of college. He wants "mid-career people who are lazy in a smart way" -- experienced developers he calls architects who know how to wield artificial intelligence (AI) coding tools to multiply their output rather than write every line from scratch.
"To be an architect, you need that previous world experience, and you need to know all the workflows," Lauer told Agence France-Presse (AFP). Candidates with "no knowledge whatsoever of the workflows" are "a lot less appealing for an organisation like ours."
It is a calculus playing out across the tech industry as a new generation of AI-powered coding assistants transforms how software gets built.
Companies using tools like Anthropic's Claude Code are letting small teams build products that once required far larger workforces, but also squeezing out the entry-level jobs that young programmers have relied on to launch their careers.
These programs -- which also include OpenAI's Codex -- have completely flipped the script on programming, turning coders from line-by-line typists into "project managers" who can use AI to instantly write, test and fix software with just a simple text prompt.
