That is the share of Anthropic’s technical hires who were junior, in early 2025 and then in mid-2026. Anthropic published that number about itself last week. Most companies never would.

The company is growing. It is still hiring engineers. It is simply hiring far fewer people at the start of their careers. By August, the AI agents its staff direct were working six hours for every one human hour. Code commits per engineer were five times higher than six months earlier.

I read the report twice. Once through the eyes of a builder, and once as someone working in public policy, trying to understand what these developments could mean for a young country like Pakistan.

Two out of every three Pakistanis are under 30. Our largest services export is IT: a record $4.6 billion in FY26, nearly half of all the services we sell to the world. Much of that rests on young people doing exactly the work the report describes. Writing code. Testing. Fixing bugs. Support. Documentation.

That is the first rung of the ladder. It is where people learn the job. And it is the rung AI is removing first. I am not........

© Pakistan Observer