A few weeks ago, I wrote about the human in the loop and why review is now the bottleneck in software development. That post triggered a lot of conversations, and one question kept coming up: What does this mean for someone starting their career today?

If you're a student, a career changer, or someone advising young people on their path into tech, this post is for you.

Fundamentals Matter Again

For the past decade, the industry focused on rapid delivery to employment. Learn React in twelve weeks. Build a portfolio. Get hired. Figure out the rest on the job.

That worked when companies needed bodies to type code. When the bottleneck was implementation speed, you could learn just enough to be useful and pick up the deeper knowledge later.

That world is gone.

When AI can implement features faster than any junior developer, what becomes valuable is the judgment to know whether the implementation is correct. And judgment requires understanding.

Algorithms. Distributed systems. Hardware architectures. Cache management techniques. Networking fundamentals. Database internals. These aren't academic exercises anymore. They're the foundation for evaluating AI-generated code.

When an AI produces a sorting algorithm, can you tell if it's appropriate for your data properties? When it suggests a caching layer, do you understand the trade-offs in consistency? When it generates a distributed system design, can you spot the failure modes?

There are endless layers to study here. Computer science fundamentals that seemed theoretical suddenly matter for practical work. The student who deeply understands how things work will outperform the one who only knows how to use them.

The Bootcamp Path Is Closing

I want to be direct about this because I think a lot of people are going to get hurt if we don't talk about it honestly.

The bootcamp model worked because it was a pipeline into "training on the job" positions. You'd learn enough to be productive on day one, and companies would invest in developing you further. Junior developer roles were abundant. The expectation was that you'd learn the missing skills over the years of professional practice.

Those junior roles are disappearing. Not slowly. Rapidly.

I can now have an AI agent do the work that used to be assigned to junior developers. Bug fixes, simple features, routine maintenance. The economics don't make sense anymore. Why hire someone who needs training when you can have a senior engineer with AI tools doing ten times the work?

This isn't a prediction. It's already happening. Look at hiring data. Look at the job boards. The entry-level positions that bootcamps prepared people for are evaporating.

I'm not saying bootcamps were bad or that the people who went through them lack value. Many excellent engineers came through that path. But the path itself is closing. The on-ramp that assumed companies would provide years of on-the-job training no longer exists in the same way.

Internships Become Critical

So, how do you develop judgment if companies aren't hiring juniors for training?

Internships. And they're about to become more important than ever.

An internship is the new apprenticeship. It's the place where you learn what can't be taught in a classroom or a bootcamp: how to evaluate whether something is actually correct, how to think about edge cases, how to understand system operation under stress, how to make tradeoffs.

Judgment isn't learned from tutorials. It's learned from watching things break. From shipping something that appeared to be right and discovering why it wasn't. From working alongside people who have that judgment and internalizing their mental models.

If I were advising a student today, I would tell them: optimize for internships. Take the one at the smaller company where you'll work closely with senior engineers, over the one at the big company where you'll be one of hundreds of interns. Prioritize learning judgment over resume prestige.

Some big companies are the exception. Cloudflare has an amazing internship program where interns actually ship real features to production. That's the kind of experience that builds judgment. But it's the exception, not the rule. Most large company internships are structured experiences that don't expose you to the real complexity of production systems.

The students who graduate with real internship experience, who have actually worked on production systems and learned from their failures, will have a massive advantage over those who only have coursework and side projects.

A New Industry Is Emerging

Here's the part that I'm really thrilled about.

For decades, custom software was only for big companies. If you were a small business, a local shop, a restaurant, or a tradesperson, you couldn't afford custom software. You used whatever off-the-shelf product was available and worked around its limitations. Or you used nothing at all.

That's about to change completely.

Think about what AI-assisted engineering (or "vibe coding" if you want to call it that) actually enables. A competent developer can now build custom software in hours that would have taken weeks or months. The economics of custom software just fundamentally shifted.

I see a new industry emerging: the local software development agency. Small operations, maybe even individual practitioners, who serve small businesses in their community. The plumber for software.

Does your local restaurant need a custom reservation system that integrates with their specific workflow? Call the local developer. The auto shop wants inventory management that works the way they actually work? There's someone in town who can build that. Does the accountant's office need a client portal? It's now affordable to have one built specifically for them.

This is like the early days of web development. Remember when every business needed a website, and local web developers built them? We're about to see the same thing, but for custom software applications.

Think of all the WordPress and Joomla customizations that small businesses relied on. Now extend that to actual custom applications, workflows, and solutions to problems that no SaaS product tackles because the market is too small.

This is going to be a booming industry. And it favors people who can talk to clients, understand their real problems, and deliver working solutions. It favors generalists who can move quickly over specialists in narrow technologies. It favors judgment over raw coding speed.

What This Means

If you're a student: invest deeply in fundamentals. Pursue internships aggressively. Build judgment, not just skills.

If you're considering a career change, understand that the easy on-ramp is closing. The bar for entry is rising. That doesn't mean it's impossible, but it means you need a realistic plan that doesn't depend on "training on the job" positions that may not exist.

If you're already a developer, the opportunity is enormous. The ability to deliver custom software to markets that couldn't previously afford it is a generational shift. Position yourself for it.

The human in the loop isn't going away. If anything, the human becomes more important as the tools become more powerful. But which humans, doing what work, for whom? That's what's changing.

The future belongs to those who can apply judgment. Start building yours now.