Fittingly, the cover image was created by AI.
You remember how it happened, right? They came out and said AI would revolutionise how we work and make us more productive.
People celebrated for a second until they realised it meant they would lose their jobs. Then they assured people jobs wouldn’t be lost but rather that we would just get to achieve more with less.
Well, jobs have been lost and they are going to keep disappearing. However, some new jobs will replace those. Enough to cover the ones lost? Probably not.
Microsoft is the latest to show how this AI boom has wreaked havoc in the coder’s world. The company laid off 2,000 people recently in its home state of Washington.
Of those 2,000, 40% were in software engineering. Yes, 800 folks in software engineering got the boot.
To make sense of this, you have to remember that Microsoft CEO Nadella recently said that up to 30% of the company’s code was now written by AI.
That is wild and should you just hang up the keyboard at this point? Not quite.
Since 2022, tech companies globally have, as they put it, “recalibrated their workforce strategies.”
After the pandemic-era digital life, companies went on hiring sprees. Now, with AI tools like GitHub Copilot becoming more capable, they’re doing more with fewer humans. That means less need for junior developers writing basic code, and more pressure to have smaller teams that utilise AI.
Not all AI’s fault
Let’s not overreact here though, watching all these layoffs might make it seem like the tech world is collapsing. But not all the job losses are because of AI.
A good number of them are because companies overhired when the world went fully digital during the pandemic. Everyone was at home streaming, shopping online, working remotely, and companies hired many coders and software engineers to meet the demand. Now that life has somewhat normalised, some of those jobs were bound to go, AI or not.
That said, let’s not sugarcoat it. AI is accelerating the decline of some roles, especially at the junior level. The types of coding jobs that used to be entry points into tech, maintaining codebases, writing simple functions, or squashing bugs, are the exact kind of work AI is now automating.
The new jobs popping up
But this is not a tech sector collapse, it’s something else. Jobs are disappearing, yes. But others are popping up, some of which didn’t exist five years ago.
So, what are the new roles replacing the traditional coding gigs?
AI/ML Engineers – The people building and fine-tuning the models taking our jobs. It’s ironic, I know, but they are in high demand so they can complete the job of taking our jobs.
Prompt Engineers – Those who’ve figured out the magic words to get the best results out of AI. A mix of coding, linguistics and experimentation. It’s not really magic though as we talked about when we discussed this:
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AI Product Managers – Not just your average Product Managers. These ones have to know how to ship AI features, manage hallucination risks and work with cross-functional AI teams.
Data Scientists & Analysts – Because AI is only as good as the data it’s trained on. We still need humans to collect, clean, and understand data.
Ethical AI Experts – Especially with the EU AI Act and similar regulations popping up globally. Someone has to keep the AI from going rogue. However, as we discussed earlier this week, that cat is already out of the bag: Refusing Shutdown, Cheating at Chess, and Blackmailing Humans: AI Is Already Acting Strange.
Where does it leave us?
The reality is that the roles above aren’t necessarily easier to get into, but they show what’s going on: the most in-demand tech skills now require understanding not just how to code, but how to work alongside AI.
So, should we still be telling every kid to learn to code? We might need to tweak that advice.
Learning to code is still useful—but not in the way it used to be. Not everyone needs to be a programmer, but you need to know how software works and how to get it to do what you want. That might involve writing code, or it might mean prompting AI effectively.
So in short, the tech industry isn’t dying, it’s changing. Coding is still part of the picture, but now it’s sharing the stage with AI, and everyone in tech is going to have to learn to collaborate with their new robot overlords co-workers.
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