Why AI Won't Kill Developer Jobs (It'll Create More)
"AI to replace developers by the end of 2025!" "Companies are firing 90% of developers due to AI!" "Run for your lives, the AIs are coming!"
These aren't dystopian movie trailers. They're the sorts of headlines flooding your feed right now.
A quick scrape of today's tech news? 57% of articles predict AI-driven job cuts. Out of 23 unique stories, 13 forecast developer doom. But here's the thing - we've seen this movie before. And it didn't end the way everyone predicted.
We've Seen This Movie Before
Remember cloud computing's early days? The prevailing wisdom was simple: sysadmins would become extinct. Everything would be "automated at scale." Fewer humans needed. Logical, right? Things turned out slightly differently though.
What actually happened was explosive growth. As Simon Wardley reminded us in our recent "Organic Talk on Artificial Intelligence" episode, the average enterprise didn't just maintain its 2,000 servers. They exploded to 200,000 servers and services, directly because of cloud adoption.
Yes, automation meant one DevOps engineer could manage more systems than ever before. But the total volume? Still demanded more engineers, not fewer.
Enter the AI Explosion
Today, the same flawed logic is being applied to software development.
AI isn't just making existing developers more productive. It's democratizing software creation itself. Marketing teams, HR departments, finance professionals - anyone with access to AI can now build applications. That spreadsheet solution your finance team cobbled together? It's now a custom internal tool built by someone who couldn't code six months ago.
In our podcast conversation with Jose and Simon, we explored this "vibe coding" phenomenon and its staggering implications. Large organizations are potentially going to have to scale from hundreds to thousands of new systems per week.
And your security team is probably already having nightmares.
The False Economy of Cutting Developers
Business leaders, seduced by promises of 10x productivity gains, are eyeing their engineering teams and asking: why not just eliminate developers altogether?
On paper, it might sound efficient. In reality? Catastrophically short-sighted.
Think about it: if your marketing department can spin up applications overnight, who's ensuring they're secure, maintainable, and won't crash your infrastructure at 3 AM on a Sunday? Existing software development and DevOps teams will be drowning. They'll be responsible not just for current codebases, but for integrating and supporting a deluge of new, quickly essential systems built by non-developers across the organization.
Cut engineers now? You're just multiplying the workload on those who remain. And where will those engineers who you fired go to - the organizations that are leaning into this explosion and scaling their growth accordingly?
Fight Fire with Fire
We already face a massive talent gap in security. The classic ratio, often quoted, is 100 engineers to 10 DevOps professionals to 1 security person.
Now imagine software development scaling by 10x or 100x. Even with consistent engineer numbers due to AI productivity gains, that equation completely collapses. Security teams are left with one choice: tackle AI-generated software with AI-powered security tools.
The implications stretch beyond security too. Where will all this software run? This might finally be serverless architecture's moment - where AI doesn't just write code but deploys, monitors, and scales it autonomously.
Because at the end of the day, software still has to run somewhere.
Change Is Inevitable. Displacement Isn't.
Organizations that thrive won't be the ones slashing engineering headcount. They'll be actively upskilling their developers and getting ahead of this seismic shift in how software gets built.
Will engineering roles change? Absolutely.
Will they disappear? Not a chance. At least not anytime soon.
The narrative isn't settled, but the smart money is on adaptation, not elimination. The question isn't whether you'll adapt. It's how quickly you can get there compared to your competitors.
Want to dive deeper? Listen to our full conversation with Simon Wardley on "Organic Talk on Artificial Intelligence" for more insights on navigating the rapidly evolving landscape of AI in technical fields. https://open.spotify.com/episode/4smSnI6Efwv2WjUP0rZqAn?si=SIuAhu34QnC31goLcq-EYg
