Claude Code vs. Your ML Career: A 2026 Reality Check

Juniors down 20%. Seniors up 12%. Here's what's really happening — and what to do about it depending on where you are.

I’ve been getting a lot of DMs lately, and they’re almost all some version of the same question: “Man, are all the jobs going to be gone? What does the future actually look like for someone like me?”

Sometimes it’s from a junior who gets ghosted after four rounds. Sometimes it’s from a friend from my Meta days who just got told their team is “not backfilling.” Sometimes it’s a student wondering if the whole field is collapsing before they even get their degrees.

And honestly, I get it. The takes out there are both scary and uninformed. They range from “AI will replace all engineers in 12 months” on one side. “AI just fails on simple tasks like counting r’s in strawberry,” on the other. After 15 months of watching this play out at Roku, interviewing candidates, and using these tools every single day, I would say that both are wrong. Here’s what I actually think is going on:

IMO, the 2026 ML job market is not dying. It has split into two. People in the first half are in real trouble. The o…