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Am I losing my job?
Published on July 03, 2026
What software developer isn't asking this question right now? AI this, AI that, Fable 5, GPT 5.5, every week, there's a new front runner. They're beating the previous ones in every metric, and they're especially good at doing the thing companies hated hiring people for: software development. Companies just see their IT departments as a black hole of costs and slowdowns. We create a lot of issues, things not working? Blame the devs. A feature isn't done? Blame the devs. The bills for their infrastructure is too big? Blame the devs. Naturally, people want to speed us up, not have to go through several steps of scoping, planning, developing, and testing to get a feature they promised a customer. That's where AI is great for them. You can put a project manager in front of Claude code and they'll start shoveling out PRs.
Someone huddles you on Slack. It's your CTO.
You answer the call but you can't hear him, his avatar isn't lighting up. He reconnects to the huddle. This repeats twice. Finally you hear him.
They called you to sync about why some features aren't merged and deployed yet, the project manager has waited all day for them to be added.
As they say that, they attempt to share their screen to show the list of PRs, but you see about half a second before the screen freezes, and you get a warning about connectivity issues. Slack starts playing elevator music indicating that you are alone in the huddle, as you hear your CTO talk while the screen is still frozen.
Slack crashes.
You go on about your day, and try to listen to some music while going through your project managers PRs. You open Spotify on your computer and switch playlist, but it starts playing another playlist than the one you chose. You have learned there's no point in writing any comments on these PRs, as they will not be read, and by the time they have done the PR they have already forgotten about it anyway. You feel like everything is repeating itself. You notice that Spotify has somehow just started playing a single song on repeat.
Programs are all becoming worse. But that's a small price to pay for accelerated development. A bug here and there is fine, when you are pushing thousands of PRs every week. While you can question why they need to do several thousands of PRs every week over at Spotify, surely you can't look past that it is a lot of development they get done with AI right? They must save a ton of money by having AI write all of that code instead. Right?
Meta is spending an estimated $50,000 per year per employee on AI tokens. Uber consumed their yearly AI budget in just a few months. Microsoft stopped using Claude because the costs were too high. Amazon have allegedly done a push to reduce AI usage after previously having a leaderboard for it. Fable 5 is several times more expensive than any other model out there. If these companies had to pay that price instead, it would be way worse. If AI is going to end up costing you the price of 1-2 developers, or even more than that, will people keep using it as much? AI currently does a lot of things, but it also can not do a lot of things still, and it lacks critical thinking, and require a lot of babying to ensure it has all required parts of the context that modern development needs, how your stack works, the requirements, the product and goals, customer needs, and much more. It simply can not critically think of all of these things, and bring it all together without a lot of external help, which often would be a developer that does it. As it is right now, I am not scared of losing my job.
Someone huddles you on Slack. It's your CTO.
You answer the call but you can't hear him, his avatar isn't lighting up. He reconnects to the huddle. This repeats twice. Finally you hear him.
They called you to sync about why some features aren't merged and deployed yet, the project manager has waited all day for them to be added.
As they say that, they attempt to share their screen to show the list of PRs, but you see about half a second before the screen freezes, and you get a warning about connectivity issues. Slack starts playing elevator music indicating that you are alone in the huddle, as you hear your CTO talk while the screen is still frozen.
Slack crashes.
You go on about your day, and try to listen to some music while going through your project managers PRs. You open Spotify on your computer and switch playlist, but it starts playing another playlist than the one you chose. You have learned there's no point in writing any comments on these PRs, as they will not be read, and by the time they have done the PR they have already forgotten about it anyway. You feel like everything is repeating itself. You notice that Spotify has somehow just started playing a single song on repeat.
Programs are all becoming worse. But that's a small price to pay for accelerated development. A bug here and there is fine, when you are pushing thousands of PRs every week. While you can question why they need to do several thousands of PRs every week over at Spotify, surely you can't look past that it is a lot of development they get done with AI right? They must save a ton of money by having AI write all of that code instead. Right?
Meta is spending an estimated $50,000 per year per employee on AI tokens. Uber consumed their yearly AI budget in just a few months. Microsoft stopped using Claude because the costs were too high. Amazon have allegedly done a push to reduce AI usage after previously having a leaderboard for it. Fable 5 is several times more expensive than any other model out there. If these companies had to pay that price instead, it would be way worse. If AI is going to end up costing you the price of 1-2 developers, or even more than that, will people keep using it as much? AI currently does a lot of things, but it also can not do a lot of things still, and it lacks critical thinking, and require a lot of babying to ensure it has all required parts of the context that modern development needs, how your stack works, the requirements, the product and goals, customer needs, and much more. It simply can not critically think of all of these things, and bring it all together without a lot of external help, which often would be a developer that does it. As it is right now, I am not scared of losing my job.