# The Great Software Quality Collapse: How We Normalized Catastrophe

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https://techtrenches.substack.com/p/the-great-software-quality-collapse

A lot in this article chimes true to me. The Enshitification is everywhere. (Discovered via [Jim's notes](https://notes.jim-nielsen.com/#2025-12-01T1259))

But this is by far the scariest thing...

> Here's the most devastating long-term consequence: we're eliminating the junior developer pipeline.
> 
> Companies are replacing junior positions with AI tools, but senior developers don't emerge from thin air. They grow from juniors who:
> 
> Debug production crashes at 2 AM
> 
> Learn why that "clever" optimization breaks everything
> 
> Understand system architecture by building it wrong first
> 
> Develop intuition through thousands of small failures
> 
> Without juniors gaining real experience, where will the next generation of senior engineers come from? AI can't learn from its mistakes—it doesn't understand why something failed. It just pattern-matches from training data.
> 
> We're creating a lost generation of developers who can prompt but can't debug, who can generate but can't architect, who can ship but can't maintain.
> 
> The math is simple: No juniors today = No seniors tomorrow = No one to fix what AI breaks.