On March 10, 2026, a post went viral. A senior developer with 18 years of experience — who had been delivering production systems when most people were still in high school — was now working at McDonald's.
His company replaced the entire 12-person engineering team with two AI specialists in a reorganization. Over 8 months, he sent 100+ applications. Interviewers kept passing him over. One HR representative told him bluntly: "Developers are a thing of the past."
The post got 2,200+ likes in 24 hours. The comments split into two camps: one said this was a harbinger of industry collapse; the other said the developer must have personal issues.
The reality: he can still code. The problem is he can't do "vibe coding" — not typing prompts and hoping for the best, but using AI as a multiplier for judgment, working at AI-native speed while maintaining architectural thinking. His 18 years gave him architectural thinking, but he hadn't yet rebuilt his workflow around AI tools.
"I don't regret the past 18 years. I just didn't expect the shelf life of experience to become so short."