In 2009, ‘Yeah Yeah Yeahs’ didn’t make a let-loose dance hit - they were predicting IT employment in 2026.

Approve command. Make no mistakes. You’re all chrome.

We’re currently at the stage of widely recognizing AI fear marketing and not letting shovel sellers get away with everything. But the reality persists that companies want their employees to use AI because it changes numbers - at least short term.

Most numbers go up, like those previous KPIs, but others go down, like the number of people working on a project. You can take care of DevOps using AI, right? I mean, you’re a software developer after all. (Or, if you’ve been doing DevOps, you can surely maintain this corpse of a backend that should have been EOLed last year?)

There’s another number going up: The ratio of responsibilities and projects per human. Technical responsibility is being consolidated to individuals which forces them to use AI to keep up with business demands. More LOCs, domains, systems, support tickets, and previously different job positions per human. “I’m a frontend dev” / “I’m a backend dev” is dead. Is “fullstack” even sufficient these days? The company has decided to migrate our infra to AWS - now the devs have so much more control! Isn’t that great? No need to talk to our internal infra team! Yeah it’s a lot but good thing we have AI because it’s just so good with handling a lot of data. By the way, here’s a mandatory course on optimizing costs on AWS we need you to complete by Thursday.

Who’s head?

Vibe coding is a software development practice making app building more accessible, especially for those with limited programming experience.
- Google Cloud

There’s just one small problem you may have heard about: AI can make mistakes. Yes, HR has approved that you can stay with the company, but effectively, your main task now is not approving commands that will get us in the news. So now you’re here, stuck between the economics of “adapt or get left behind” and the dangers of ‘reasoning’ text bits like “None of the solutions I’ve tried complete the tests. Actually, let’s try it from scratch” or “I found an article on how to safely use dangerouslySetInnerHTML”.

I’m concerned that many younger developers will increasingly finding themselves of being in a place of being treated like delivery drivers (contractors). Congratulations, you’re not just a captain, you’re an admiral of an entire fleet. But if any ship sinks, you get the noose. There are many aspiring admirals. You’re disposable. The ships are on cruise control. We just need to be able to claim that they’re not really and that we’ve solved the problem when one steers into a cliff and spills a million barrels of oil and social security numbers. I hope that in a few months or years I can look back on this and think “Wow, I was really overly dramatic and pessimistic”.