Lin Yue graduated from college just a year before the layoff came. He'd beaten thousands of candidates to land a backend engineering role at Ctrip, China's largest online travel agency. He was assigned to the hotel department — the most profitable business unit — working on commercial product code.

At 23, earning 25,000 RMB per month, he was the picture of success for a new graduate.

Then the AI wave hit.

Ctrip had been known as the "retirement home of the internet" — 10:30 AM start times, two-hour lunch breaks, leaving at 7 PM sharp, two-week iteration cycles. But by the time Lin Yue joined, AI coding capabilities had exploded. The pace became brutal.

"We went from two-week iterations to one-week releases," he said. "I was working until 10:30 every night."

It wasn't because business was booming. It was fear. "If you don't find things to do, you become a marginal department. And marginal departments get cut," Lin Yue told 36Kr.

The warnings were everywhere. Token competitions. AI training sessions. Hidden考核 (invisible performance metrics tied to AI usage. Everyone was caught in an "all-in AI" movement. Everyone knew layoffs were coming. It was the unspoken consensus.

In mid-May, his team lead called him into a meeting room. "You're on the list," the lead said, getting straight to the point.

Lin Yue's first reaction was calm. He'd seen it coming.

But standing at the HR door, something broke. His hands started shaking. He hesitated for a long time, trying to figure out how to start the conversation, how to compose himself. "I never want to go through something like that again," he said.

The math was cold. With only one year of experience and a relatively low salary, he was cheap to let go. And junior engineers were the least efficient at using AI — senior developers, with their deeper business knowledge, could leverage AI tools far more effectively. "With business experience打底, knowing what you want to do with AI and what the impact will be — senior people understand that better," Lin Yue explained.

Stanford researchers call people like Lin Yue "canaries in the coal mine" — young workers whose careers are being erased first. Their research shows that since ChatGPT's launch in 2022, employment among 22-25 year old software developers has dropped nearly 20% from its peak.

After the layoff, Lin Yue threw himself into job hunting — ByteDance, Kuaishou, Taobao. Nothing came through. "It's too hard," he said. The dream of continuing as a "big factory programmer" was slipping away.

A friend tried to comfort him: "It's okay. We'll all have our day. Yours just came earlier."

But Lin Yue isn't waiting around. He's watching the industry change and drawing his own conclusions.

"If only AI coding had stayed at the 2025 level," he mused. "It would level the playing field between someone with 1-2 years experience and someone with 7-8 years, without actually replacing people."

But technology doesn't stop for anyone.

He has no doubt that the disappearance of programmers is already happening — "just like textile workers after the invention of the spinning jenny."

The question isn't whether the job will disappear. The question is what comes next — and whether there will be anything left for the generation that was just getting started.