I'm the VP of Engineering at Forage. We partner with companies to create job simulations that students can use to build skills and gain experience.

We currently have several SoftwareSeni developers on our team at Forage. And I'll always grow that team where I can.

I like how SoftwareSeni operate. Their top engineers split their time between working for clients like Forage and mentoring. They're constantly training, constantly levelling up their entire team.

One of the things that I've been really impressed with SoftwareSeni is their AI adoption. They run AI hackathons. They're constantly training. I went over there for the first time in July. And when I was there, we ran through their AI plan. They have a whole action plan on how they're making all their engineers, all their staff, AI enabled.

Forage was ahead of the curve. Two years ago we told our SoftwareSeni developers "Yes, you can use Copilot," but then once Cursor came out everyone was on it. I was paying for Cursor for our dedicated developers on the corporate credit card before it became enterprise-wide within EAB (Forage's parent company) because I wanted the team to have it.

So our dedicated developers were among the first using AI. What they learned was shared with the rest of SoftwareSeni because they're all always learning and sharing what they've learned.

During that brown bag legacy code session, one team was able to rebuild our internal program editor. They did an amazing job in just two hours. We actually start that project, updating the legacy editor, next quarter and we will use what was built during the session as the basis.

Forage is in the early talent market. This is the worst hiring market in five years. Forage's business is still growing but growing slower than we were because no one's hiring. And there's a lot of reasons people aren't hiring and there's macro elements to that — the Trump administration, there's interest rates, but there's also the big hairy AI scaring people.

So we know that our customers are hiring less, but they're still hiring because these are 10,000 people firms, 100,000 people firms, and part of bringing juniors in is the importance of longevity in the business and business knowledge. There's people leaving and people retiring and they need to fill the bottom of the bucket.

So I don't ever think juniors aren't going to be needed. They're just going to be done differently. But I think it'll be the big companies hiring them. If I was telling a junior engineer what to do today, I'd tell them to go and work in a large company because you can get a lot of experience there.

Maybe you could go with a startup. But startups these days would be crazy to hire juniors. When I worked for small, mid-market companies we'd hire a couple of juniors because they're cheaper and we can train them up and we only need a certain level of output.

But now a team of five very senior engineers can probably do the work of eight to 10 engineers. So that's why I'd say as a startup it wouldn't make sense to hire a junior engineer, but as a big company, it makes more sense.

If you consider the competitive advantages of using AI, it turns out your product features are no longer an advantage.

Pre-AI, if you had a complex feature that would take a team six months to build and you got there before your competitor, that was an advantage.

But that's not an advantage anymore because that six months can now probably be duplicated in a month or faster with a team of well-trained engineers.

I don't think features are the advantage anymore. The advantage is not in the tech anymore. It's the execution of the business.

And so how do you go to market with that? At Forage, our advantage is that we have relationships with some of the biggest employers. We've got relationships with thousands of universities. Our parent company is one of the biggest edtech companies in the US. So that's our advantage. It's not the tech.

I've spent my whole career building software. Software is no longer your secret weapon. You can get smart about features or the way you present things, UX/UI is really important but it's just so easy now.

And if you follow Product Hunt you see thousands of product copy-cats come out now and I always laugh because they'll all be dead soon because they'll realise how hard it is to sell a product, obtain a customer, service a customer. There's a lot more to building and running a business than just building tech.

If you're targeting SMEs, you'll probably find a saturation of duplicate products in the SME to mid-market.

You could replicate Forage, but trying to get it out to market and get in the door is the barrier. Once you move upwards into mid-market, into enterprise, you need to have someone that's experienced in selling to them. They want to know who you work with, what's your security stance, what's your compliance stance…You need to be able to tick those off.

Some guy who has vibe coded an app, the new "Airbnb" or the new enterprise "Airbnb" app, is just going to fall over with that.

And that's where the experience comes in for these companies. The incumbents aren't going to be ripped to pieces. They're just going to be pushed to build better products. But now they can, and faster.

Often the advantage of an existing incumbent was "their software's crap and mine's better". That's no longer the advantage because those incumbents now can invest in getting their engineers up to speed with AI and they're now able to turn around faster.

Enterprises will become way more nimble, but only if they adopt the tools. I'm sure there's a lot of them out there that are a bit apprehensive. And I'm sure a lot - like CBA - are pretty fast moving and modern thinking. But everyone's got the same tools now.

Forage's competitors, they may come out with a new way of doing career simulations, but they have to grow their network. It took Forage eight years to get there and a strong competitor could possibly accelerate and halve it, but that's still four years. And in four years we could then look at them and go, "Oh, they're doing something great" and we just build that in.