Yeah I think it was in Terence Tao's recent post where he pointed out that the "low-hanging fruits of mathematics" are being harvested by the AI companies, when traditionally those problems were available for aspiring mathematicians to prove themselves in the community. Maybe there's a parallel in the software world too.
There absolutely is a parallel in the software world. I have 16+ years of experience in software and I have enough coding under my belt to guide and inform coding agents to solve the problems.
This is the reason why hiring is down for fresh graduates. We don't have low hanging fruits types of problems to give them anymore.
So until the industry figures out the workflow, the hiring for fresh graduates is going to be tricky.