How AI is rewriting the software development industry
Right now, we're seeing that coding skills alone no longer guarantee job security. You need to layer them with AI literacy, collaboration, and product insight.
I remember meeting a junior developer named Bola* a few years ago at a tech hub in Lagos. She had just finished a coding bootcamp and was buzzing with excitement about landing her first job. “There’s so much demand for developers,” she said. “I just need to get my foot in the door.”
Fast forward to today, and Bola’s optimism feels like a relic of another era. If you’ve tried breaking into software development recently, you’ve probably noticed that the door isn’t just harder to push open but feels like it’s being welded shut. The reason? Artificial Intelligence (AI).
We're seeing AI rewrite the very jobs that coding bootcamps once promised to deliver. Those fast-track pathways into software development are shrinking, and the industry that once fed eager graduates like Bola is starting to falter.
Is AI eating up coding bootcamps?
For over a decade, coding bootcamps were pitched as tickets to six-figure tech careers. They promised that after a few months of intensive training through Python, JavaScript, or React, you could land a job as an entry-level software engineer and start climbing the ladder.
And for a while, that dream was real. At their peak in 2019, U.S. bootcamps alone generated over $500 million in revenue and graduated more than 34,000 students. But by 2022, enrollments were dropping, down about 20% year-on-year, and several high-profile coding bootcamps, including Lambda School (now BloomTech), slashed ~50% of their staff. Even Career Karma reduced its workforce by ~33% and laid off 60 employees in July 2022 and then again in 2023.
But it’s not that people don’t want to learn. It’s that the roles they were training for are vanishing.
Emmanuel Oyedeji
AI coding assistants like GitHub Copilot, ChatGPT, and Tabnine can write boilerplate code, debug errors, and even handle testing. You don’t need a small army of junior developers anymore; one mid-level engineer with AI can do the work of three or four. And the numbers back this up: according to Gitnux, around 67% of developers now use AI tools to help write code, and 78% of AI tools focus on code generation and bug fixing.
Put simply, the “foot in the door” roles are disappearing. And if you want proof, just look at the paychecks.
Shrinking salaries tell the story
In the U.S., entry-level software engineer salaries dropped from ~$100K in 2022 to ~$85K in 2024 (via Glassdoor). Remote roles took an even bigger hit, down ~50% YoY.
The same pattern shows up in emerging markets. In Lagos and Accra, junior developer pay slid from ~$600/month in 2022 to about $400–450 in 2024. Meanwhile, senior engineers continue to see modest bumps.
That tells us something important: the bottom rung of the ladder is shrinking. AI is compressing pay precisely where bootcamp grads used to climb. And this isn’t just about salaries. Revelio Labs reports a staggering ~70% decline in software developer job postings between Q1 2023 and Q1 2025. In other words, the opportunities are drying up, and it doesn’t stop there.
Emmanuel Oyedeji
Layoffs have also been hitting software engineers hard. Since 2022, Layoffs.fyi says over 425,000 tech layoffs have been reported globally, and the brunt of them have fallen on engineering teams. Companies like Meta, Google, and Shopify have cut tens of thousands of developer roles while simultaneously expanding their AI teams.
So the jobs you once trained for through a bootcamp are disappearing, but roles requiring AI and machine learning (ML) expertise are booming. And that brings us to the good news.
Software development isn’t disappearing, but it's changing shape
Software development itself isn’t going away. It’s evolving. AI engineers, data scientists, and machine learning specialists are in demand like never before. LinkedIn’s 2024 Jobs Report lists AI engineer as one of the fastest-growing roles globally, with salaries averaging $140,000 in the U.S.
What this means is simple: the rules have changed. The entry-level “foot in the door” job isn’t enough anymore. To compete, you need AI literacy, knowing how to integrate, supervise, and collaborate with AI tools. Bootcamps that pivot toward training AI-augmented engineers will survive. The rest will be left behind.
David Adubiina
And for emerging markets like Africa or Asia, the stakes couldn’t be higher. Coding bootcamps were once pitched as a way to leapfrog into the global tech economy. But affordable junior coding talent may no longer be a competitive advantage. The upside, though, is huge: markets that invest in AI skills and product-focused engineering could actually level the playing field.
So, no, the software development industry isn’t dying; it’s being rewritten. And AI might as well hold the pen.
*The name has been changed.
