I dropped out of school and went into startups with my first full-time gig in March, 2000. Managed to make that one last a few years, but whoooo boy that was a

I dropped out of school and went into startups with my first full-time gig in March, 2000. Managed to make that one last a few years, but whoooo boy that was a tough time to be a junior-to-mid developer looking for a job. I even went back to school with plans to go to medical school (yet I'm still a developer 20 years later.) Being a junior is rough, landing those first few gigs, no doubt about it. It didn't get any better with the advent of code schools, which pretty much saturated the entry level market. But, if you stick it out long enough and keep working on learning, you'll acquire enough skills or network to land that first gig and build from there. I wouldn't freak out about AIs—they're not going to take all the jobs. They're a tool (and a good one, sometimes.) Learn to use it that way. Learning a good tool can easily accelerate your personal development. Use it to understand by asking it to summarize unfamiliar code, to point you in the right direction when you're writing your own code, but don't have it write code you don't understand (and probably can't, because it doesn't work as written.) Give it a few years, things will generally work out. Make a plan to be resilient in the meantime and keep learning and you'll be fine.