Nobody cares about your beautiful, elegant, handcrafted code. Software engineers are engineers first and foremost, and producing code was never the main goal for software engineers. Engineers solve problems with code, such as increasing revenue or decreasing spending. Engineers exist to apply scientific innovations to businesses, in order to increase profit. There’s really nothing else to it.

In fact, the ideal amount of code is zero lines of code. Unfortunately, with zero LOC there’s not a whole lot you can do.

As a software engineer, it’s crucial to avoid getting lost in the intricacies of complex scale systems, algorithms, and optimisation when it’s not necessary, but if you find yourself in this category, it’s essential to realise that AI is rapidly advancing and could replace you.

This is not only for programmers or software engineers, but the impact on these classes of jobs is much more profound. This is because the current cutting-edge AI tech is centered around “large language models.” These models are often represented with chat bot interfaces. These models understand the structure of language and are essentially able to output statistically likely words and generate sentences in this way. Programming languages are just that: languages. They’re structured, logical, pattern-based languages with clear syntax and rules. If there’s one thing LLMs excel at, it’s pattern matching in structured domains. Your code, no matter how clever you think it is, follows patterns that an AI can learn, reproduce, and often improve upon.

You are replaceable

Let’s face it: no matter how brilliant you are, how elegant your code is, or how many AI tools you’ve mastered, your individual uniqueness isn’t the main thing that matters to most companies. As I discuss in my post about meritocracy, it’s rarely about you as a person. It’s about the value you generate versus the cost you represent.

If you’re self-employed, the equation shifts a bit. Your job is to ensure your business is profitable because if it isn’t, the market will replace you just as quickly as any employer would. The bottom line still measures you: can you bring in enough revenue to cover your expenses and keep the lights on?

For engineers, especially software engineers, this reality is becoming even starker. Business leaders constantly look for ways to cut costs and speed up development. Tools like ChatGPT and other AI models can now produce MVPs (Minimum Viable Products) in a fraction of the time and at a fraction of the cost compared to a human engineer. When the decision comes down to delivering results quickly and cheaply, the cold reality is that you’re competing with tools that never sleep, never take vacations, and don’t ask for raises.

That’s the world we’re in. It’s not about your potential or your passion; it’s about your impact on the bottom line.

Yes, it is capitalism, actually

Western societies are built on capitalist principles, and these principles push everyone, regardless of their morals, to trade and compete with each other. Wages are one of the most considerable costs for companies, and since the abolition of slavery, it turns out that you’re supposed to pay the people who work for you. Of course, humans also need to eat, sleep, and socialise. Happy humans are productive workers, so many companies spend significant resources on benefits, paid time off, training, team building, and more.

But what if you didn’t need to do any of this? What if you could have humans working 24/7, without lunch breaks, without vacation, and for free or for a significantly lower cost? This is how LLM-based AIs are being sold at the moment. It doesn’t matter if this is true or not. Of course, CTOs and CEOs of tech companies building AI models will quickly praise their products and claim cost reductions and efficiency improvements in the hopes that you buy and use them.

The long-term implications of AI

This current trend of cyclical layoffs (firing thousands of employees and replacing them with AI) is unsustainable. IBM has cut nearly 8,000 jobs that they claim AI can handle. Amazon laid off 18,000 workers while simultaneously investing billions in AI. Google fired 12,000 employees in 2023, then announced they’re “betting everything on AI.” The pattern is clear: invest in AI, fire humans, boost stock price.

As many industry experts point out, without junior engineers entering the field and gaining hands-on experience, we risk a future without seasoned senior engineers overseeing AI applications in complex software codebases. This isn’t just a tech problem; it’s a pipeline crisis that could stifle innovation and leave us unprepared for the challenges ahead.

Yet, there’s little incentive for companies to act differently. Under the frameworks of capitalism and social democracy, the priority is short-term profit and efficiency. AI is the perfect solution in this environment: it’s fast, cheap, and scalable. But perfect doesn’t mean best. It’s not the future I envision, and I suspect many of you feel the same. If we want a different path that values human growth alongside technological progress, we need systemic change. This starts with introspection, realigning our priorities as a society co-inhabiting this planet. Could we advocate for policies that incentivise mentorship and training? Could we rethink how we measure corporate success beyond quarterly earnings? These are the questions we must grapple with if we’re to build a sustainable future. It’s not easy to imagine such a future, and I’m very pessimistic about any changes happening soon. Still, the alternative will be a continuation of wealth accumulation by the few, robbing the many of our time and youth.

Second Thought has a great video on the topic of life after capitalism that I can’t recommend enough: What Comes After Capitalism?

AI sucks (and that won’t save you)

Now, I know what you’re thinking: “But wait, you just spent several paragraphs telling me AI is coming for my job. Now you’re saying it sucks?”

Yes. Both are true. And that’s precisely what makes this situation so dangerous. AI doesn’t need to be good to replace you; it just needs to be good enough and cheap enough. AI sucks right now. And it will likely continue sucking in the future. However, unfortunately, mediocre and cheap beats excellent and expensive in most business decisions.

Some AI experts argue that current AI technology, specifically Large Language Models (LLMs), will never fully replace programmers. Why? Because LLMs are trained on massive amounts of public data (everything from open-source code to graduate theses to random internet trivia). This means they’re great at generating code that looks correct and compiles, but they often miss the real business needs or the subtle requirements behind a project. For more on this, please refer to MIT Technology Review [archived version].

Regardless, the future is uncertain: Even if LLMs are not suitable for writing code in an unsupervised manner today, that doesn’t mean they will not improve over time. Even if the improvements are gradual and subtle, there’s still no reason to believe the growth can’t become exponential, as AI 2027 [archived version] points out.

AI is just a bubble!

Another common argument is that AI is just a bubble, destined to pop like crypto before it.

Some AI detractors like to argue that crypto experienced similar growth and massive investment, but nothing really changed fundamentally. They’re right about crypto; after billions in investment, what do we have? Expensive JPEGs and environmental damage. One key aspect that sets AI apart from crypto is that crypto promised to replace money, while AI promises to replace workers. One is ideological; the other is economical.

Crypto required everyone to buy in, to agree that digital coins had value. AI requires no such consensus. It just needs to produce something that looks like work for less money than a human costs. Crypto was selling a dream. AI is selling labor cost reduction. Which one do you think appeals more to corporate boards?

There has been a lot of talk about replacing workers with AI, but I think insufficient focus has been put into how lucrative this would be for employers.

In previous paragraphs, I point out how this current Western society model is built upon capitalism, and again, the reality is, AI and everything it entails is worth almost any expense. Workers that don’t sleep, don’t complain, don’t strike, don’t take time off, don’t need to eat, don’t need continuous training (they self-train in parallel to their own work)… and they cost a fraction of a fraction of what you pay your current workers today?

Again, it’s not about how likely or sound AI LLM output is. The truth is that AI can and already is doing many tasks that used to require deep technical expertise, and what’s worse, replacing many entry-level job roles like junior programmers, dramatically lowering the chances of getting into the tech industry for recent graduates.

Conclusion: What are we going to do about it?

The rise of AI isn’t just another tech trend—it’s a fundamental shift in how work gets done. Whether we like it or not, the technology is here, it’s improving, and it’s being deployed at scale. The question isn’t whether AI will impact your job, but when and how much.

For those of us in tech, the writing is on the wall. We need to adapt, but adaptation under capitalism often means racing to the bottom: working longer for less, constantly retraining, competing with machines that never tire. Is that the future we want?

The uncomfortable truth is that yes, you are replaceable. But that’s always been true under capitalism. What’s changing is the speed and scale at which that replacement can happen. A company can now “hire” a thousand AI workers with a single API call. They can “fire” them just as quickly. No severance, no bad PR, no guilt.

So what are we going to do about it? Individual action won’t save us; becoming an “AI prompt engineer” or learning the latest framework is just postponing the inevitable. This requires collective action, systemic change, and a fundamental rethinking of how we value human labor and human life.

We could fight for Universal Basic Income, knowing that tech companies will lobby against it. We could push for AI regulation, knowing it will be written by the same companies building the AI. We could retrain for “AI-proof” careers, knowing that no such thing exists. Or we could start questioning the system that makes human obsolescence profitable in the first place.

The real question isn’t how to compete with AI. It’s whether we want to live in a world where we have to. Because right now, we’re building that world, one layoff at a time, one AI deployment at a time, one quarterly earnings report at a time.

You are replaceable. I am replaceable. We’re all replaceable. The question is: are we going to do something about it together, or are we going to optimize our individual résumés and hope we’re not next?

I know which option capitalism prefers. Do you?