[LRUG] Ghosttown

[Yevhenii Kurtov]

Re leverage AI to start your own business - I concur and am of the opinion that
this is one of the best options. It may not be immediately possible for
people who need to put the food on the table and are short on savings. If
LLMs really provide value, then smart people with professional software
development experience should be able to benefit from it.

Some motivation can be found in
https://www.amazon.co.uk/100-Startup-Reinvent-Living-Create/dp/0307951529,
and if you need business co-founders, YC Cofounder matching is a great
place to start.

I also would be wary of adding "AI-native" to a CV. It may land in the
inbox of a person who would think that a person just burned a few thousand
pounds worth of tokens and can't think for themselves
https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.20245 (This is Anthropic research btw).

On Wed, 11 Feb 2026 at 14:47, lrug.flaring659--- via Chat <
chat at lists.lrug.org> wrote:

> Hey Michael, it certainly does.
>
> The whole market’s been down for a few years, but Ruby, one of my all-time
> favs, seems to have almost disappeared from the visible job market entirely.
>
> Two of my least favourite ecosystems, JS and Python, have roughly thirty
> to sixty times more opportunities respectively.
>
> I’ve already seen a couple of businesses go all in on the AI hype and bury
> themselves under mountains of tech debt, so it definitely still needs
> people that know what they’re doing to build something sustainable. I’ve
> also seen quite a few mid/senior roles advertised to rescue companies from
> this situation, probably not very attractive from a prospective candidate’s
> point of view.
>
> With entry-level roles disappearing, it’s hard to say how this skills gap
> will end up effecting the industry. I guess companies that are bullish on
> AI are hoping the tech will evolve enough before it becomes a more
> significant issue, and if not, they’ll still be enough people coming into
> the industry — who knows.
>
> A few options, based on what you’ve said:
>
>
>    - Hope the Ruby market bounces back
>    - Try switching stacks
>    - Leverage AI to start your own business
>    - Retrain — electricians and plumbers are raking it in 💷😄
>
>
> On 11 Feb 2026, at 11:10, Michael Pavling via Chat - chat at
> lists.lrug.org <chat_at_lists_lrug_org_sxxkmvwj at simplelogin.co> wrote:
>
> Well... The jobs market looks pretty bleak, doesn't it?
>
> There seems to be no entry-level roles now, and the mid/senior roles are
> few and far between, with hundreds of applicants scrabbling to stand out
> with their AI tuned CVs :-(
>
> What's gonna be the case in a couple of years? (Or even at the end of this
> year)
> Is that it for Ruby jobs now? Is it the end for almost all tech stacks? 😬
>
> Do we all just need to re-align to be maintainers of the output?
>
> *sigh* What's everyone's hope for a best outcome?
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