u/DadModeDave

SpaceX announced it struck a deal with Cursor (AI coding tool if ur unaware) that gives them the option to buy the company outright for $60 billion later this year, or pay $10 billion for their joint work on "coding and knowledge work AI." Just let that number sink in. $60 billion for a startup that didn't exist 4 years ago.

Cursor's founders are four MIT grads who started Anysphere in 2022 with an $8M seed round backed by OpenAI's fund. Now they're potentially the biggest acquisition in tech history.

But here's the part I keep thinking about as someone who went through a bootcamp and now works in this industry:

The deal pairs Cursor's AI expertise with SpaceX's Colossus supercomputer, and the stated goal is literally to build "the world's most useful models" for coding. Not assist developers. Not help with boilerplate. The world's most useful coding models. That's a different ambition entirely.

Cursor is also facing fierce competition from Anthropic's Claude Code and OpenAI's Codex so even the dominant AI coding tool right now is under pressure.

And then there's the broader context this week:

• OpenAI dropped GPT-5.5
• Amazon committed $5 billion immediately to Anthropic (with up to $20 billion more tied to performance milestones)

So every major AI lab is now swimming in compute and money, and they're all pointed at the same thing: making coding easier and more automated.

I'm not here to doom-post. I actually think there's still a strong case for learning to code properly. But I'd be lying if I said this week's news didn't make me reconsider the advice I give people who ask "should I do a bootcamp in 2026?"

The honest answer is: it depends more than ever on what you're learning and why. If you're grinding CRUD app tutorials hoping to land a junior dev role doing what Cursor already does - that's a hard conversation. But if you're learning to work with these tools, understand what's happening under the hood, and build things that require actual judgment? I think you're fine.

Curious what people here think. Has this week changed how you're approaching your learning path or what you're telling people who ask for advice?

Following layoffs in 2025, the narrative is "things are recovering." They're not for juniors.

What's actually happening is companies measured that AI tools make developers 40-55% more productive per sprint. Once you see that number, the math on hiring 5 junior devs changes pretty fast. They're restructuring: fewer juniors, more specialized seniors.

So if you're early in your career here's what the job data is actually pointing to right now:

Security engineers are one of the few roles explicitly getting more work, not less. AI is generating more vulnerable code faster than anyone can review it. Cybersecurity job postings doubled year over year.

Platform/SRE roles are quietly becoming one of the hottest categories. Six figure postings are up significantly and most bootcamps aren't even teaching it.

ML skills went from 3% of job postings in 2024 to over 5% in 2025 and still climbing.

The junior roles that are disappearing are the ones that were essentially "write boilerplate and attend standups." That work is gone. The ones surviving are juniors who understand systems and can review AI output critically.

Btw this isn't to deter anyone from joining the field, just understand that the field is shifting and knowing where it's shifting is half the battle