AI Changed Junior Hiring — Most Devs Haven’t Realized It

A developer with 30 years of experience argues that AI integration — not traditional framework development — is the biggest career opportunity for junior developers right now. Drawing on a Mark Cuban podcast clip, the author contends that the real money is in building 'harnesses' around LLMs (orchestrating models like GPT, Claude, and Gemini) to solve real business problems, especially for small and medium businesses that lack AI expertise. The author recommends juniors learn coding fundamentals (~150-250 hours), system-level thinking, and how to leverage multiple AI models rather than chasing React or Angular skills. Traditional boilerplate coding is increasingly automated, but AI-assisted development still requires foundational knowledge to avoid hitting the '80% wall'.