The panic running through LinkedIn on AI right now is insane. Tech bros are spreading nonsense like developers are jobless & DeepSeek is going to kill everything, and agents are the future. Bunkem!
People talking about software developers being replaced aren't thinking about the entire process. They're not asking what happens about deployment, security, patches, or library updates (who is building them?! What? You don't need them? You're gonna have AI grow your own SSL handshaking?). Who is building Laravel or .NET? Where are the customer demands? If AI is creating products, who asks AI to support new features?
Those same people aren't talking about infrastructure or bugs in code at 2 am. Who's fixing that? Who is triaging errors and deploying a fix?
The world ultimately relies on human connections, and those parading around like the town crier calling us all jobless are hellbent on eliminating human connection. But humans want to connect with humans. Who uses Alexa to do all of their shopping? Who likes calling the bank only for the transcription to hear BEN when you said TEN? Nobody. Humans naturally resist this kind of technology because it doesn't bloody work.
However, for a minute, stop and imagine a world where these people are right. I am jobless; AI agents build products. Who is buying them? No businesses exist. You fired all your staff for AI agents, including me. I have no earnings, so I can't buy music or access SaaS products. You built a product that made people redundant, and now you have nobody to sell to. In a world where you outsource everything to AI - only those businesses exist. Only Sam Altman, Elon Musk, DeepSeek and NVIDIA are left in a room full of businesses along with cloud vendors. Everything else is dead.
Gramarly, DataDog, Trello, Asana, Monday, Adobe all dead. Nobody needs project management, logging, or language help.
Businesses won't need B2B SaaS. That document signing service? Dead. Slack? Dead. Don't need Dropbox anymore, you work alone. Salesforce? Who are you selling to? Mailchimp? That becomes a charitable project supporting children's football. ToDoist? Dead. Google Workspace, Canva, Xero, FreeAgent. All gone.
If you manage to find customers, you haven't built anything original. Your ideas are yours, but your code is borne out of AI. Competitors can undercut and outperform you - remember you're AI-built, so your competitors know your secrets are in AI. How do you compete? Arguably you help your competitors. "Hey AI, build me a copy of X".
You're the one out of bed at 2 AM fixing platform bugs, answering support emails that the AI screwed up, and you're the one trying to find out how to advertise. It doesn't sound too cosy.
And then there is the security element of it all. Somebody like me one day wakes up and decides to look at your product; they're on some antiquated MacBook Pro - a measly 16 core, 32 GB machine left over from when they were a developer. They're bored. They decide to look at your code; they use the same platform you built your product with to find exploits in your code. It all came out of AI. My freebie agent executes some code at 3AM, wakes you up and your entire business is GONE. Wait, what? Didn't you have a backup? Oh.
The biggest preservation of business is the same greed fueling the panic. Employees pay taxes. When tax receipts decline, what happens? Would the leaders of the UK, USA, Argentina, the Philippines and India let it? No, They need the tax receipts to fund society. That very greed these tech bros are chasing to cut their staff costs will be the same greed that forces governments to act for their preservation. As people realise they do more for themselves, they don't need the tech bros chasing greed.
Sales engagement plummets as AI tools send automated messages to prospects who know its AI. So what happens? The sales team sends the messages themselves; their introduction starts with a declaration of not being AI - engagement increases. Humans crave and desire human-to-human connection.
Suddenly, humans start to desire humans again. You realise you don't want competitors to know your secrets, so you hire a guy to build it. You send sales emails yourself. You get on the phone. Your wife is pregnant and you can't do those 2AM bug fixes any more. New government regulation says you must adhere to some new policy, but it's complicated; you need to spend 3 months filling in government paperwork. What do you do? You pay a guy.
AI will increase output and expand people's toolsets, creating more demand. But you're going to have a job. The tech bros have been playing these cards for years now. I was told I would lose my job in six months, 18 months ago. Any day now!! Ignore the tech bros, keep focused on your customers.
AI Agents are an appealing idea - that I will admit. But the reality is, when you scratch below the "WE ARE DOOMED" rhetoric, they don't hold up too well. There is no getting through to the tech bros. They're busy making their $99 courses, updating their Patreon's and putting AI into their LinkedIn profiles.
This is a slightly longer version than the one I published on LinkedIn