My Honest Thoughts on AI and the Job Market in 2026

If you want to land a job as a web developer in 2026 or beyond, this is the video for you. I'm going to be talking about everything you need to understand about the job market right now. I'm going to be talking about how AI interacts with all of this. And I even am going to talk about exactly what you need to learn, whether it comes from the actual front end, back end, or AI technologies. And if you want a deep dive into everything that there is to learn about web development, I have cheat sheets for both the front end and the back end that cover over 250 different topics. I have 250 plus videos on here, 120 different projects. I have 62 different articles, and I have a light mode and a dark mode for both of these. It'll be linked down in the description below. And I highly recommend that you check out these cheat sheets if you're seriously interested in learning web development, no matter when it is. And I update these all the time. So, if you're watching this video in 2027, the 2027 version will be there as well. [music] Welcome back to WebDev Simplified. My name is Kyle and my job is to simplify the web for you. And before we start diving into job numbers and how you can stand out and land your job as a developer, we first need to talk about the elephant in the room, and that is AI, we need to understand where it is, where it's been, and most importantly, where it's going to be going in the future. Now, if you talk to any of the big AI CEOs, they're going to tell you that AI is essentially on a trajectory that looks like this. It's starting out kind of weak and it's boom, just going to be a massive exponential growth that's going to take over the entire world, and no one will have jobs anymore. Now obviously this is not the case at all for AI. Realistically the way that the graph looks for AI is something like this. We draw out this graph and it started out pretty weak. So we can say it was pretty weak and it got better and better and better and it got better pretty quickly. But eventually it started to kind of fall off and it started to get weaker and weaker and weaker and the actual improvements of the AI models themselves have gotten less and less as the months and years have gone on. If we go all the way back to when chatbt first started, it was relatively weak. And every month or every few months, it seemed like there was massive improvements to the actual model that was being released for you to use. But nowadays, in, you know, 2026 and 2025, those incremental improvements were much smaller and much further spread apart. But you may notice that AI still was quite powerful and the things it was able to do seem to be getting better at a rather rapid pace. And that's not because of the model itself getting better. It's instead because of the tooling around the models getting better. If we look at things like claude code, cursor and agentic coding, background agents, and those types of things, those have gotten better at a relatively steady if not increasing rate. So, we look at a chart for those, it may look something like this where we have a relatively steady and maybe, you know, slightly upward trajectory for them. But again, it's a mostly linear trajectory for the improvement of these different toolings. So, while the models themselves may not be getting drastically better, what's happening is that the tooling around them is getting better at a steady rate, while the models are getting slightly better, which makes it seem like the AI is getting significantly smarter, when in reality, we're starting to kind of hit the limits of how powerful these models can be. This is actually quite apparent when you start to use these tools. You may notice that certain models are specialized for certain things and do them better than others. For example, certain models are better at UI. Certain models are better at large code bases. Certain are better at smaller code bases and so on. And that's because we can't just have one model that's good at everything. Otherwise, you know, that exponential curve would be there like the CEOs are saying they are. Instead, we're starting to hit these limits. So, different models are specializing in different things. And this tooling is what helps us bring together all these different models and use them for the specific use cases they're good at, which means we're able to get kind of the best of both worlds where all the best models we're able to use for what they are best for. And I think going into 2026 and 2027, the tooling is going to continue at a pretty steady rate like it has for a while. And these AI models are just going to level off even more to the point where there's very small incremental improvements to them and nothing groundbreaking like we saw back in 2022, 2023, and so on. This means that I don't actually think that the AI is going to be significantly more powerful than it is currently inside of 2025 or the beginning of 2026. It's going to be incrementally better, but not by a leaps and bounds where it's drastically changing the capabilities of what it currently can do. Just imagine what AI can do right now and then add a little bit to that. And that's probably what it's going to look like in the next year or two. Now, what exactly does this mean for you and the job market in general, though? You've probably seen this chart a million times. And this chart just shows, you know, jobs were relatively good in 2020. Then COVID hit, job market plummeted. We lost about a third of all the software development jobs that were listed on Indeed. And then you can see into 2022 it spiked to 230%. So we went from 60% to 230. That means we essentially had a four times increase in the number of jobs being listed for software developers on Indeed. And then after they realized, hey, we way way way overhired. You can see that this job market number dropped drastically and now we're sitting at about, you know, 68% or so, which is pretty much around that trough that you saw kind of in that co time. But this doesn't really paint the best picture mostly because this is based on just job listings and just job listings on Indeed and just job listings on Indeed in the United States. So it's a very specific subset of data. More important set of data would be looking at the actual number of people employed as software developers. But unfortunately that data does not span as far as I would hope it to. There is a chart with that data on this exact same website. This specifically lists the number of people employed as software developers. And you can see this data goes from 2000 to 2019. So unfortunately it stops right before we get to the co times but you can see it's been steadily increasing over time and it's actually been quite quickly increasing you know between maybe 2012 and 2019 and that was when people would say you know this is kind of like the peak of the developer job market minus all the co stuff that was happening. But what's interesting is when we combine these two different charts together it paints an interesting picture that may not make the job market seem as bleak as it currently may look like. So if we combine these together, you'll see that essentially I set 100% on this graph to be 100% on the right hand side graph. So this lefth hand side here is the number of people employed as software developers. You can see it steadily increasing over time. And this right hand side is going to be the number of job listings. And as you can see, we essentially have this in parody. So the number of job listings in 2020 is equal to that job number on the left hand side. And the interesting thing is if we look here, we're at 68% currently of what essentially 100% value would be. And if we go back, that's essentially what the levels in 2014 were. So 2014, that was a very good job market for software developers. That's when I graduated college. Very easy to land a job as a software developer. Now, the job markets are entirely different between these two. But the reason I'm bringing this up is to show that it's not nearly as bleak as it looks. When all you do is you look at this one chart, it looks terrible. It looks like essentially you're dropping from 200% all the way down to 60%, which is a massive drop. But in reality, what's happening is this was way over inflated for a very short period of time. And realistically, this is what the actual software developer trend looks like. You can see this is the anomaly and the actual trough right here is not nearly as low as you think it is. Also, if we take a look at this graph, you can see that it's actually starting to trend upward towards the end. We kind of hit a bottom section of this graph in May of 2025. And if we go across here, you can see that at the very end of 2025, it's about a 12 13% increase from May. So, that's actually a very large increase. It doesn't look that way just because of the way that this graph is so over inflated, but a 12% increase is a very large increase in the number of job listings. And this I think actually parallels my point with AI very well because right now in 2025 and 2024, the job market was not good for software developers. There wasn't as many people hiring and a lot of companies were blaming AI, saying that AI is the reason that they're no longer hiring developers. But for the most part, they were just overhired from this massive peak that they went through. So essentially all they were doing was trying to get down from that massive overhiring peak by firing people and AI is the perfect excuse for that because it makes your company seem really good to investors since you're focused on AI while also letting you get rid of a ton of people to lower your cost even if the reason is not actually for AI. You're just saying it's for AI to help both investors and to save some face. Now many companies did fire people thinking that AI was going to take over the jobs for them. And I think the fact that this graph is starting to trend back upwards with more and more job listings means that these companies that did fire because they thought AI would take things over are realizing, yeah, AI is good and it's a great tool for developers, but it doesn't actually replace the need for an actual developer, which is why we're seeing more and more jobs being listed. And I think going forward into 2026 and 2027, that's only going to increase, especially for junior developers. That was definitely the job market that was hit the worst. Senior developers were still fine during this time period because they were the people that companies were wanting and junior developers were the ones they thought were going to be replaced. And now as people were realizing that AI is not good enough to replace a junior developer, they're having to hire back on junior developers. And I think the job market for junior devs will get significantly better than it currently is since over the last you know year or two it has not been great. Now you may be thinking Kyle that's all great but AI is going to replace me. It's inevitable. It's going to replace my job 100%. to that. I have an example that I want to share with you to really put into place how ridiculous this type of mindset is. First of all, if AI was able to fully take over your job and every other job out there, then there's much bigger problems for us to worry about than, you know, learning web development or not. Because if every job is gone, we have huge problems. But the example that I want to talk about is imagine an airplane. We have pilots that have specifically lots of training and tons of hours that they need to go through in order to fly a plane. But every single plane that they're going to be flying, mostly commercial airplanes, is going to have very fine-tuned and sophisticated autopilot on that plane to fly the plane 95% of the time that the pilot's behind the wheel. So when the pilot is in the actual cockpit, 95% of the time the autopilot is flying the plane, managing all the tasks for the pilot, but the pilot is there to monitor to make sure everything's going okay and to make sure that when more specific or difficult tasks come up that the autopilot cannot handle, the pilot is there to take over those things such as landing or takeoff. This is how I view the tool of AI in the web developer coding space. You're going to eventually need to be able to use and work with AI in order to write code because that's just the way that it's moving. AI is getting good enough that it is making it significantly quicker for people that are sufficient in AI to build projects much quicker and much better than people that aren't using AI at all. But if you think that this AI is going to take over your job, I think you're wrong in the same way that autopilot does not remove the need for a pilot. We still need someone to overview the AI that is writing our code to make sure the code they're writing is secure, to make sure it's good quality, to make sure it's maintainable, to make sure it does what we want. And there's many cases where the AI doesn't know what to do. it doesn't have the right documentation or maybe it just can't quite get this thing right because the model's not good enough or the tooling is not good enough. So we need highlevel skilled developers to be able to look at what's happening and to go in there and fix and write the code for the things the AI cannot do. So we need oversight and we need highly skilled developers to go in and write specific code where the AI cannot solve these problems. These are specifically the skills that I think are going to be most important going forward in the next 5 years of the job development market. You're going to want to have high skills in specific things and be able to know how to do things that the AI is not very good at. And you're going to want to be able to be really good at reviewing code, reading code, and oversight on an AI to make sure that it's doing the things that you want it to do. So, for example, you need to be good at prompting the AI, and you need to be good at taking the output the AI gives you, understanding what it is, and making it work for your particular application. And this pretty much transitions perfectly into the topic of how you should be learning properly to make sure you're able to take advantage of AI. Now, this is my front-end road map. I have a backend and a front-end road map that you can download. I'll link them in the description. They are massive. Essentially, I have over a 100 different projects inside of here. I have 200 plus videos, 60 plus articles. I mean, this is just chocked full of all the information you need in the order you need to learn it. But essentially, what you want to do is you want to take the concepts, understand obviously the basics, so you can read how this code works, but then dive deep into specific, more niche topics. And that's going to be what elevates you above AI. As long as you understand the basics and the foundations of how things work and how to write clean, secure code, you're able to overview and oversight the AI relatively well. But when you want to do more complicated things that the AI sucks at, having a deeper understanding into some of the more complex features in like CSS for example or maybe some of the more complex JavaScript features, that's going to be amazing at really allowing you to accelerate yourself much further and much faster in the job market because now not only are you good and sufficient with working with AI, reviewing code, and reading code, but you also have these more niche skills that a lot of other developers don't have, which means now you have essentially two steps above every other developer. you're good with AI and you're also good with specific skill sets that the AI is bad at. I think CSS is actually a perfect example of this because when you look at the AI output for CSS code, it pretty much only uses the bare minimum. We have like flexbox, grid, some positioning related stuff, some colors, and that's it. You're never really going to see many CSS variables. You're never going to see anything that's advanced or modern in CSS such as like layers, supports, the custom app property, starting style, animations. You never see any of that stuff inside of the CSS generated by AI. But if you understand and know how to write those things, you're able to take your code to the next level. You're able to make websites that differentiate themselves from others because of these advanced features you're using, and you're really able to make yourself a much better developer. So, what steps exactly do you need to take? If you're a junior developer and you're just learning how to code from the very beginning, I highly recommend download this road map. I mean, this applies for any skill set that you're at, but download this road map and follow it through. But really focus on learning the fundamentals, learning how code works. And more importantly, make sure that you write your code on your own. If you're an entry-level developer, don't let AI write all the code for you. Use AI to ask it questions. How would I do this? What are your recommendations for this? Hey, I'm interested in this thing. What should I learn about this in order to use it? Those are the things you should be using AI for. Asking it questions and having it give you feedback on the code you wrote. But you should be writing all the code yourself when you're first getting started so you understand how it works. I mean, when I was learning web development, we had Stack Overflow, for example. You could go there and copy and paste code into your project and more times than not, it would work and give you what you want. But you don't actually learn from doing that. AI is like a superpowered Stack Overflow where instead of copy pasting code, it just writes all the code for you. So, you never have to think or understand. If you don't write that code yourself, you're never going to learn to be a better web developer. And those are important skills that you need to have in order to use AI effectively inside of a company. Now, once you get those fundamentals down and maybe you've mastered 50% of the concepts inside of this road map, then I would say you're a little bit more of an advanced developer and you understand those basics. So then you can start working with AI to learn how to use AI in your day-to-day. Learn how to write good prompts by practicing different prompting techniques. Make sure that you ask the AI, hey, I'm writing this particular prompt for this thing. How should I word this prompt to get feedback from it? Learn about things like agents. Learn about prompt files. Learn about different rules that you can specify. Learn about all the more AI focused things and use AI to build some projects. You can still write the code yourself or use the AI or some combination of the two. But having that feedback of working with the AI in more of an agentic workflow is really important because that's what you're going to be using a lot of times inside of a company that's having you write code. They want you to be working with the AI to write code quicker and better. This is also the perfect opportunity to practice code review. Whenever the AI gives you back some code, I want you to review every single line of what that code is. Look through and understand exactly what's going on. I actually have a full video showing you my 10-step code review process. I'll link it in the cards and description for you so you can really dive into it. But this is one of the most important skills you can learn to make yourself a better programmer in the world of AI because reading and reviewing code are two skills that used to be somewhat useful, but are now incredibly useful, if not one of the most useful skills that you can learn. So now once you've figured out the fundamentals, 50% or so of what's inside of this document, and you figured out how to work with the AI, your next step is essentially to build out these projects that you can put on your portfolio by learning some of the more advanced features inside of here. So for example, let's just go back to CSS. You could learn some of the advanced features like scroll animations, the layers property, and how the advanced color functions work to build a really unique looking landing page or project and use these advanced features that are going to be something that the AI is not very good at. So, first of all, it's going to make you practice and work with them, but secondly, it's going to look really good on a resume because now you're using these advanced features. So, not only can you work with an AI, but you can also build projects that look good and use these advanced features. And if you've been practicing all these skills we talked about, such as reviewing code, you also have really good code review skills. And all that combined together are going to be the holy grail of skills that you need to land a job as a web developer or really any programmer out there. So if you want to get started on the process, I highly recommend downloading this road map. I'm going to have the front end and backend one. They're both at the same exact link. It'll be linked down in the description for you. It's entirely free. So you can download these, go through, like I said, there's over 200 different videos, over 60 articles, 120 or so different projects. It is a massive road map that covers everything that you need to learn from knowing absolutely nothing all the way up to intermediate level web development skills across front end and back end. With that said, thank you very much for watching and have a good