Vibe coding and layoffs: what is really happening in the developer job market in 2025

Vibecoding and Layoffs: What's Actually Happening with the Development Market in 2025

An article on Habr breaks down the main question facing the market in 2025-2026: will vibecoding change the profession of developer beyond recognition — and if so, when exactly will it happen.

Panic or Reality

Talk about developer layoffs due to AI has been going on for several years, but mass layoffs haven't happened yet. Companies are indeed hiring fewer juniors — the number of vacancies for junior developers in the US dropped by 25-30% in 2024-2025. At the same time, salaries for mid-level and senior specialists have not decreased, and in some segments have even grown.

The key dynamic looks like this: one senior with Cursor or GitHub Copilot does the work that a team of three or four people used to do. Companies are not laying off existing employees — they are simply not opening new positions. In startups, this is especially noticeable: rounds A and B, which once meant hiring ten engineers, now end with hiring two or three.

What Vibecoding Really Is

"Vibecoding" is when a developer describes a task in natural language, and AI generates the code. Productivity grows, but unevenly depending on the type of task:

• Simple CRUD operations and template code — are fully generated by AI without edits
• Debugging with Claude or GPT-4o speeds up 2-3 times
• Writing tests — one of the most popular and effective scenarios for tool application
• Documenting code — AI does this faster and more carefully than most people
• Refactoring legacy code — AI handles tasks that people used to run away from

Where the task is complex — requires architectural decisions, understanding of business context, or integration with a non-trivial system — AI remains a tool, not a replacement. It accelerates implementation but does not formulate the task for the developer.

Are Juniors Still Needed

Here the picture is ambiguous. Entering the profession has become harder, but not impossible. The traditional path through "write a CRUD application in a week" no longer works — this level of tasks is completely closed off by AI tools. But vibecoding simultaneously created a new entry point. The ability to correctly formulate tasks to the system, check its output, find errors in generated code, and integrate the result into architecture — this is a separate skill that is valued. Junior developers who work well with AI get jobs. Those who ignore the tools and count on writing all code by hand — face difficulties.

"AI didn't replace the developer.

It replaced the developer who doesn't know how to use it."

Companies began hiring "AI wranglers" — people who specialize in prompt engineering, assessing code quality from AI, and tuning development pipelines. This is a new niche that didn't exist three years ago.

What This Means

The development market is redistributing, not collapsing. Those who can work with AI tools as a system win, not those who use them as smart autocomplete. For those entering the profession: learning architecture and systems thinking is more important than the syntax of a specific language — and master the tools before competitors do.