Juno Maps launches VIBE After School, a free and open framework pairing K-12 students with working professionals and AI tools to build real things. A guide to the shifting job market and what communities can do about it now.
Dustin Rauch, CEO, Juno Maps10 minute read
Let me open with something I did not expect to be writing. I run a technology company. I am also a father. And I am starting to question whether a traditional four-year college is the right path for my own children. If that sentence lands uncomfortably, I understand. It landed the same way on me. It is also, I think, an honest read of where the economy is going. And it pushed me toward a harder question. If the old map no longer fits, what should we be doing instead, starting now. This is my attempt at an answer.
If you have a child in school right now, or you are watching someone close to you choose a major, start an apprenticeship, or come back to work, the map they are navigating is being redrawn in real time. Week to week the change is easy to miss. In the data, it is not.
The short version. The tools now widely called AI are changing what work looks like faster than schools, employers, and families are adjusting. Some careers are being absorbed into the tools. More are being amplified by them. The careers worth aiming for are the ones where human judgment, care, and craft become sharper when paired with AI, rather than replaced by it.
If that sounds abstract, a chart published by Anthropic a few weeks ago makes it concrete. Two shapes, laid on top of each other, describe where the economy sits today.
What the shapes show.
Theoretical capability
The share of job tasks in each category that current models could perform.
Observed usage
The share of work actually being done with these tools today, based on real traffic on one of the most widely used AI systems.
Figure reproduced from Anthropic’s published research. Used with attribution.
Figure 1. Theoretical capability and observed usage by occupational category. Source: Anthropic, "Labor market impacts" research, 2025. Full research and methodology at anthropic.com/research/labor-market-impacts. Figure reproduced with attribution.
The blue shape reaches into almost every profession. The red is a small, uneven bloom concentrated in a handful of fields. The distance between them is the story.
The gap tells two stories at once. The ceiling of what AI can do is much higher than anyone is using. And the floor of what it is already doing is moving. The useful question is not whether the shift is coming, but where it lands first, and what to do in the meantime.
People who tend to do well through shifts like this share one habit. They choose tools before tools are chosen for them.
One
What the tools do, in plain terms
Think of AI less as a distant science project and more as a new kind of colleague. It has read more than any person alive. It never gets tired. It is confidently wrong often enough that it still needs a human to decide when its answers are good enough to use. Most of what is changing in offices today comes from three capabilities.
It writes.
Emails, memos, reports, code, legal first drafts, marketing copy. Work that used to take a morning can take seconds.
It creates.
Images, video, slide decks, songs, working applications. Often at the level a small business can actually use.
It reasons.
Reads contracts, audits spreadsheets, drafts diagnoses, plans projects. Anywhere a task is a puzzle with a pattern.
The pace is the story.
Figure 2. A rough trajectory of useful AI capability over a decade. The 2030 point is an estimate, included for shape, not precision.
Five years ago, a model could barely complete a sentence. Today it drafts production code. Whether the next five years repeat the curve is genuinely uncertain.
What is less disputed: the tools are already better than most organizations have absorbed. Even if development paused tomorrow, the absorption lag alone implies several more years of change.
Two
The thing we should start doing now
If this is where the world is going, the question is not whether schools will catch up. It is whether we can give kids a better starting point this year. There is a simple, practical way to do that, and most communities already have everything they need to start.
The biggest leverage sits earlier than most people think. Not in universities. In elementary and middle schools, where children are still open to everything and these tools are at their most inspiring. Most districts already run mentor programs, Odyssey of the Mind, STEM clubs, and robotics teams. A new framework fits right beside them. In most towns, it could start with a handful of volunteers and a single classroom.
A proposal to bring into your community
VIBE After School
An after-school mentor-and-make program that pairs students with working professionals in their own community and gives them the AI tools, time, and encouragement to build real things. The goal is exposure, not another class. A fifteen-year-old who has spent one afternoon with a working engineer, nurse, designer, or tradesperson, and who has vibe-coded her first app, enters high school with a map. Most of her classmates do not.
V
Venture
Real exposure to people doing the work. A mentor in the room, a visit to a real site, a conversation with someone five years ahead.
I
Imagine
Protect time and space for curiosity. The tools reward the child who asks a strange question more than the one who follows a script.
B
Build
Every student ships something small every quarter, with AI as a collaborator. Working apps, working circuits, working drafts.
E
Express
Make sure the work reflects who they are. These tools are the first medium that lets a ten-year-old release what she imagines into the world.
The ingredients already exist in almost every community. A PTA that invites. A local employer that says yes. A teacher or youth leader willing to give an hour a week to the people walking in the door. If your community wants to run a pilot, we will help connect mentors and share the framework. Reach out at [email protected] or vibeafterschool.com.
VIBE is a starting point. It gives kids a map earlier than they would otherwise get, and it puts working professionals, the ones already living the new map, in the same room. From there, the question becomes what we are preparing them for, and what families can do at the kitchen table while the schools catch up.
Three
What we are preparing them for
If VIBE is the ramp, this is the terrain. Three columns of careers: work that is compounding with AI, work anchored in human presence and physical skill, and work that is being absorbed into the tools. Compensation ranges reflect current market signals. They are wide on purpose and are not promises.
Column One
Compounding with AI
The tools multiply what a skilled person can do. Judgment is the product. The tools make it sharper.
Column Two
Anchored in humans
Work that depends on presence, trust, or physical skill. AI helps at the edges. The core stays with the person.
Column Three
Being absorbed
Not disappearing, but compressing. Ten roles may become three. The skills transfer. The titles shift.
The left column uses AI heavily, which is the opposite of the instinct to hide from the tools. The middle column is the one most often overlooked in articles like this one: electricians, nurse practitioners, HVAC technicians, welders. Demand here is rising for reasons that have little to do with AI. Demographics, electrification, reshoring, and overdue infrastructure do the work.
The right column is not a list of failures. It contains careers that were safe and reasonable as recently as 2021, held by people who trained seriously and are still needed. The shape of the work is changing, and the skills transfer. This is a transition, not a verdict.
A quick note on the right column. Every absorbed job has a better cousin.
For anyone currently in the third column, or with a child training for one, the most useful pattern in the data is the adjacent role. The skills almost always transfer. The transition is easier the earlier it is made.
Four
If you do not wait for a program. The VIBE moves at home.
These are the same four ideas behind VIBE, just applied at home. Venture, imagine, build, express. None require a pilot program, a budget line, or anyone’s permission. You can start tonight.
Most kids do not need perfect guidance. They need earlier exposure.
Put the tools in the hands of the kids.
Sit down with them, open a model, and use it for something real. Homework, a birthday message, a research question, a recipe. Fluency comes from daily use, not from reading about it, and the children who grow up comfortable with these tools will carry a real advantage.
Encourage vibe coding.
Vibe coding is the new word for something remarkable: building software by describing what you want in plain language and letting the AI write the code. With a chat window and a free afternoon, a ten-year-old can ship a working website, a small game, a music visualizer, or an app that solves a problem in her own life. It is one of the most freeing forms of creative expression a child has ever had access to. No other generation could build like this. Give your kids the room to try it, and watch what they make.
Do not over-index on prestige.
The right path is the one that fits the actual strengths of the person walking it. The best electrician or HVAC technician in 2035 may well earn more than many lawyers do today. Matching the path to the individual tends to outperform chasing a name.
Take the trades seriously.
Compensation data for skilled trades has been quietly strong for a decade. Electrification, reshoring, and infrastructure are likely to extend the trend. Two-year technical programs, apprenticeships, and two-plus-two paths produce strong earners and stable careers.
Focus on skills over credentials.
Employers increasingly hire on demonstrated work rather than degrees alone. A portfolio of real projects, shipped and referenced, has become more legible than a GPA. Encourage the portfolio early.
Help them start things.
Running a club, building a website, launching a small service, shipping a newsletter. The skill of beginning, recruiting help, handling rejection, and finishing is the rarest capability in the economy and the one no tool can provide on a child’s behalf.
Arrange a day of shadowing.
Most practitioners say yes when a family asks respectfully. One afternoon in a real lab, shop, clinic, or studio clarifies a direction that months of research cannot. It is one of the lower-cost, higher-return moves available.
Five
A short note for leaders
This piece is aimed at families and schools because that is where change can happen fastest. Policy matters too, and four moves stand out for anyone with institutional leverage. None require waiting on Washington.
Make benefits portable. When health insurance follows a worker instead of a job, people retrain faster and the labor market adjusts.
Create lifetime learning accounts. A small payroll contribution and a public match, held in an account that follows the person and pays for retraining.
Build. Housing, transmission, nuclear, rail, water, heat pumps. These projects employ the same trades the AI economy needs.
Modernize the public stack. Permits, licenses, benefits, 311. The state that fixes this first earns real civic and economic dividends.
The places that move first will likely capture a disproportionate share of the high-wage employment that follows.
The only question left.
This is not the end of work. It is the end of a theory of work, the one where a person chose a field at nineteen and expected the choice to hold for forty years. That theory has been fading for a while. AI is accelerating it.
What is emerging is, in some ways, older. A life of small apprenticeships. A portfolio that grows slowly. A reputation that compounds. Tools that sharpen every year. That life used to be reserved for artisans and physicians. It is now available to many more people, with better instruments than have ever existed.
The opportunity in front of us is not to predict the future perfectly. It is to give kids a head start in a world that is already here. The tools exist. The mentors exist. The schools and families willing to try exist. The only question left is whether we put them in the same room.
If your school, your company, your city, or your own kitchen table wants to be one of the first, start. Reach out. VIBE is an open framework. We will help you run a pilot, connect mentors, and share what works. The press contact below goes straight to us.
A note on uncertainty. Everything above is an interpretation of current signals, not a forecast. Compensation ranges reflect present-day market data and are likely to move. Specific professions will emerge and fade in ways that are not yet visible. The argument of this essay is not that any one career is guaranteed, but that the shape of the opportunity is legible enough to make thoughtful choices, and that flexibility will outperform prediction.
Dustin Rauch
CEO, Juno Maps
Juno Maps builds software for the people who actually run things. The company makes Hubity, an AI-powered operating system that lets a business of any size, from a single-operator shop to a global enterprise, run from one workspace instead of a dozen disconnected tools, and Smart Site Plan, a spatial intelligence platform used by anyone working in land development to manage projects from early concept through construction and long-term maintenance. Both are built around the same conviction that animates this essay: the most useful thing AI can do right now is give the people doing the work the judgment and leverage that used to require a much larger team.
This essay reflects the personal views of the author.
VIBE After School is a free, open mentor-and-make framework that pairs K-12 students with working professionals in their own community and gives them the AI tools, time, and encouragement to build real things. The program runs one afternoon a week for a semester, costs near zero to launch, and is designed to work alongside existing school programs. VIBE stands for Venture, Imagine, Build, Express.
VIBE After School is an initiative of Juno Maps, a software company that builds tools for the people who actually run things. Juno Maps products include Hubity and Smart Site Plan.
Distribution note. Alternate headline: How AI Is Changing the Jobs Your Kids Are Preparing For.
Sources and ranges blend Bureau of Labor Statistics projections, the Anthropic Economic Index, and the author's reading of current signals. Figure 1 reproduced from Anthropic research at anthropic.com/research/labor-market-impacts. Reasonable people will disagree in both directions.
