Geek Park reviews 1024 Programmer's Day: entry-level positions shrink as programmers shift to directing AI

**Key points**

**1. The holiday's protagonists shift to AI and "builders"**

In 2024, the Weibo topic drew 4.07 billion views; this year the conference was renamed "1024 Programmer Day & AI Builders Conference," with the theme "Everyone Can Build."

**2. Entry-level positions shrink, work shifts to verifying and directing AI**

Software developer employment among 22–25-year-olds in the US is down nearly 20% from its 2022 peak; domestically, backend demand fell 41% while AI positions rose 7.9-fold; the share of entry-level technical roles among Anthropic's new hires fell from 27% to 9%, with employees increasingly shifting to reviewing code, assigning tasks and signing off.

**3. The name "programmer" is shifting from people to tools**

"Computer" once went from a profession to a machine; now "AI programmer" and "coding agent" are rising, and new titles are turning to builder, AI engineer, FDE.

**4. The holiday will still be held, but it no longer belongs to the original small circle**

Next year there will still be lights, keyboards given out and Tokens handed out, but the protagonists will become builders, AI tool marketing and local industry calling cards, and the original circle no longer needs it to confirm its identity. 2026-10-24 18:17 This year's 1024 may be the last Programmer's Day Geek Park Quick Read

This article is from the WeChat public account: Geek Park, author: Wildcard, editor: Jing Yu, cover image from: AI-generated

All day today, people on X have been discussing, "Happy 1024 Programmer's Day, will this year be the last Programmer's Day."

For the fifth consecutive year, Insta360 gave outstanding programmers gold keycaps, adding a new "F5" key this year, symbolizing constant refresh and iteration. At the award ceremony, a young colleague made a joke: "This year's gold keycap should be given to AI."

And on Xiaohongshu, some programmers are clearing out old books under the tag "era of ancient-method programming," with *Illustrated HTTP* at three yuan a copy and algorithm books at ten. Another post's title is "Programmers' books, even Duozhuayu won't take them," and among the few books that finally sold, the most expensive turned out to be *The Mythical Man-Month*.

A holiday has been given a day off, has expanded its recruitment, and even its "bible" is discounted on the secondhand market.

Holidays usually don't die from being canceled. They die when no one needs them anymore to confirm who they are. To understand this sentence, we first have to go back to how this holiday came about.

1. From code monkeys' secret code to everyone's holiday

1024 was never an official holiday. Its distant relative is Russia's "Day 256" Programmer's Day established in 2009; when it spread to China, because the date drifted around due to leap years, it was replaced with the easier-to-remember 2 to the 10th power. Roughly since 2015, October 24 has become the customary "Programmer's Day."

This is a secret code only insiders understand. Growing up alongside it is a whole set of self-mockery. Around 2006, "IT migrant worker" circulated online; from 2009 to 2012, "code monkey" spread rapidly, followed by "code slave" and "code livestock." The premise of self-mockery is a threshold: only with a salary noticeably higher than peers and work outsiders can't understand do you have the confidence to call yourself a migrant worker. In 2021, the Ministry of Human Resources and Social Security classified software practitioners under the statistical category of "new-generation migrant workers," and programmers flooded their feeds with "code monkeys really have become peasants," the tone more amusement than anger.

Then this secret code was invited out of the circle. In 2020, CSDN held the first 1024 Programmer's Day in Changsha, opened by an academician; in 2023 it appeared on CCTV, and in 2024 the Weibo topic reached 4.07 billion views.

Interestingly, the holiday's promotional slogans have kept changing. In 2023, the Changsha conference shifted its focus from open source to artificial intelligence for the first time. In 2024, the Programmer's Day hosted by the China Software Industry Association had already adopted the theme "AI is like a tide toward the future, we have no choice but AI"; at the Changsha conference opening ceremony, CSDN founder Jiang Tao demonstrated on stage using natural language to make AI write code.

By this year, the conference was renamed "1024 Programmer Day & AI Builders Conference," with the theme "Everyone Can Build," and seated at the opening ceremony were the founders of several robotics companies. "Builder" is far broader than "programmer"; among the new programmers' works listed in that "expanded recruitment" tweet were a consumption cooling-off reminder, a wardrobe outfit generator, and a program that lets Li Bai chat with you—many of the people who made them had never hand-written a line of code. AI programming tools also treat this day as a customer acquisition moment: ZCode gave away 500 million Tokens, TRAE held a check-in lottery, and 92.5% of the officially announced results were a 10-yuan coupon.

2. The unluckiest cohort of computer science students

Computer science students who enrolled in 2021 and 2022 joked upon graduating this year that they were "the unluckiest cohort in history." When they enrolled, they saw Fruit Day and offers obtainable after a few interviews; when they graduated, they found almost no one willing to hire entry-level employees.

The data is on their side. Stanford research shows that software developer employment among 22-to-25-year-olds in the US is down nearly 20% from its peak at the end of 2022, while senior developers have largely held steady. Domestically, in MyCOS's employment blue book, computer science majors fell out of the undergraduate green-card major list and the top ten high-salary majors for the first time; Maimai data shows backend development job demand fell 41%, while AI positions rose 7.9-fold.

What was pulled out was not the whole ladder, but the bottom rung.

The most convincing sample comes from a company that has taken AI programming to the extreme: Anthropic itself. In mid-this month, Anthropic released a report on changes in its own workforce. From early 2025 to now, the share of junior employees in its technical departments has fallen from 21% to 14%; among newly hired technical employees, the share of junior roles has dropped from 27% to 9%, cut by two-thirds.

Of course, there are dissenting voices. Amazon CTO Werner Vogels said in an interview in Shenzhen a few days ago that Amazon is hiring junior engineers "as before," and that newcomers need to learn to collaborate with others, understand a system that has been running for twenty years, and judge which AI-generated code needs careful review.

But even in his account, the value of newcomers has already shifted away from "writing code" to somewhere else—to verification, collaboration, and judgment.

For those who remain, the work itself has also changed.

In September this year, DHH, the creator of Ruby on Rails, announced something at the Rails World conference in Austin: his company 37signals no longer treats handwritten code as the regular way to develop software. He called it "Pencils down." This man, who once said he would rather retire than hand his keyboard to AI, asked the audience on stage how many people still write a lot of code by hand.

Only five people raised their hands.

Programmers in China are going through the same shift. A backend engineer at a big tech company said that in the past he spent 60% to 70% of his day writing code, with the rest confirming requirements, doing design, and troubleshooting. After AI entered his workflow, that ratio completely flipped. A doctoral student recalled that two years ago, when he opened an AI coding window, he had to avoid the gaze of senior lab mates, because "using AI made you look incompetent, like you were slacking off." Now he actively recommends it to them.

So, this year 1024 happens to fall on a Saturday, and programmers can finally take a day off—is that good news?

There is another set of numbers in that Anthropic report. In March this year, the working hours of the company's internal Claude agents exceeded those of human employees for the first time. By August, the working hours of agents directed by employees were already six times those of humans themselves.

The report describes engineers' daily routine as having several coding agents' terminals open at once, switching back and forth among a dozen contexts. Backend data shows that in interactive agent sessions, about 80% of the time is idle. It is not that the models run slowly; they are waiting for humans to give the next instruction.

Writing code is no longer the bottleneck; human attention is.

Programmers are turning from "people who write code" into "people who review code," "people who assign work to AI," and "people who sign off on results." These jobs are all important, and some are even harder than writing code. But they share one thing: none of them really needs the code "1024."

A profession's name decoupling from what it actually does has happened before in history. And last time, it happened to be related to "computing" too.

III. The computers of the past

Before electronic computers appeared, "computer" was a profession.

The word referred to people—specifically, people who did calculations. At the end of the 19th century, the Harvard Observatory hired a group of women to analyze star-map photographs one by one; they were called the "Harvard Computers."

Around 1891, female computers at the Harvard College Observatory analyzed star-map photographs. Image source | Harvard College Observatory

During World War II, the laboratory of the US National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics in Langley, Virginia, hired hundreds of women with mathematical talent to manually calculate wind tunnel data and flight trajectories. One segregated department among them was called the "West Area Computing Group," made up entirely of African American women.

In the summer of 1949, the "computer room" of the NACA High-Speed Flight Station, where computers manually processed flight test data. Image source | NACA / NASA

In 1945, the world's first general-purpose electronic computer, ENIAC, was completed at the University of Pennsylvania. The six women responsible for getting the machine running were selected from the human computers who had specialized in calculating ballistic tables at the time. They became the first "programmers" in history.

In February 1946, ENIAC programmers Betty Jennings (left) and Frances Bilas prepare for a public demonstration | Image source: U.S. Army

Dorothy Vaughan, the head of the West Area Computing Group, did something when she saw IBM's electronic computer being moved into Langley in the late 1950s. She taught herself FORTRAN and then learned it together with the computers under her. The machine took over calculation, and they turned to writing programs for the machine. In 1958, the West Area Computing Group was disbanded.

From left: Dorothy Vaughan, Lessie Hunter, and Vivian Adair, all formerly human computers at Langley | Image source: NASA

But the human computers did not disappear overnight. In 1962, astronaut John Glenn was preparing to fly aboard Friendship 7 on the United States' first crewed orbital flight around the Earth. The trajectory had already been calculated by IBM computers, but Glenn was not reassured, and he specifically asked that Katherine Johnson, a mathematician from the West Area, check the numbers by hand. According to the most widely circulated account, his exact words were that if she said the numbers were good, he was ready to go.

On February 20, 1962, John Glenn entered the Friendship 7 spacecraft. Image source: NASA, public domain

The machine did the calculating, and the human signed off on the result. This scene from more than sixty years ago looks almost exactly like engineers today reviewing agent output one by one.

Katherine Johnson working at NASA in 1966. Image source: NASA, public domain

Everyone knows what happened next. The word "computer" survived, but what it referred to changed completely: from a group of women sitting at desks with slide rules to a machine. That occupation was never declared extinct; it was simply swallowed by its own tool, which took over its name.

No one celebrates "Computer Day" today. Not because computing has become unimportant, but because computing is now everywhere—so important that it no longer needs a dedicated group of people to represent it.

The profession of programmer was itself born at the moment when the previous profession was diluted.

Now it is its own turn.

You can see the early signs in the shift in naming. In 2024, a company called Cognition released Devin, with the tagline "the first AI software engineer." After that, almost every major tech company launched its own "AI programmer" or "coding agent." The title of ByteDance's TRAE community 1024 event this year was "Salute to Real AI Engineers."

The word "programmer" is slowly shifting from people to tools, just like "computer" did back then.

And on the human side, the names are changing too: "builder," "AI engineer," "agent manager," "FDE." According to Maimai data, hiring for field deployment engineer roles has risen 15-fold year on year. None of the new names contains the character for "code."

So back to the question at the beginning. Will this year's 1024 be the last Programmer's Day?

Most likely not. On October 24 next year, Changsha Zhigu will still light up, the big tech companies will still hand out keyboards, and AI coding tools will still give away hundreds of millions of tokens on that day. The holiday will continue to exist, and it may be livelier than ever.

Only the stars of the show have changed. It will become a festival for all "builders," a marketing moment for AI tools, and an annual calling card for local industry. That small circle, originally held together by self-deprecation—the people who shared a tacit understanding because they knew why 1024 was funny—will gradually discover that this holiday no longer needs them to confirm its identity.

Just like Dorothy Vaughan's generation: in the end they did not hold on to the name "computer," but they became the first programmers.

The people today staring at six agent terminals on their screens at once—what they will be called in the future has no answer yet. What is certain is only that 1024 is still 2 to the 10th power; that number will not change. What changes is who still needs it to prove themselves. AI Venture Capital Daily Channel: Frontier Technology

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