I can tell you where I am seeing it change things for sure, at the early stages. If you wanted to work at a startup I advise or invest in, based on what I'm seeing, it might be more difficult than it was 5 years because there is a slightly different calculus at the early stage. often your go to market and discovery processes seed/pre-seed are either: not working well yet, nonexistent, or decoupled from prod and eng, the goal obviously is over time to bring it all together into a complete system (a business) - as long as I've been around early stage startup there has always been a tension between engineering and growth on budget division, and the dance of how you place resources across them such that they come together well is quite difficult. Now what I'm seeing is: engineering could do with being a bit faster, but too much faster and they're going to be sitting around waiting for the business teams to get their shit together, where as before they would look at hiring a junior, now they will just hire some AI tools, or invest more time in AI scaffolding etc... allowing them to go a little bit faster, but it's understood: not as fast as hiring a jr engineer. I noticed this trend starting in the spring this year, and i've been watching to see if the teams who did this then "graduate" out of it to hiring a jr, so far only one team has hired and it seems they skipped jr and went straight to a more sr dev.