Something is happening more and more often in companies across industries and sizes, something that would have been out of reach a short while back. A piece of a product goes live without a single line of code written by an engineer. A manager builds it and ships it.

That tells you more about where work is heading than the headlines about machines taking people’s jobs.

The worry about AI rests on an assumption that there is a fixed amount of work to go around, and that software will let fewer people do it. I see the opposite. The amount we can produce is growing, the range of things worth doing keeps widening, and we may need more people rather than fewer, working on different things than before.

More gets done by more people

Scans can be sorted and flagged before a doctor opens them, so a doctor can get through more of them. A course can be presented in any language, so more people can take it. Someone with an idea can build a working app without hiring a team.

None of this makes us happier on its own. It makes many things easier to reach. The number of worthwhile things worth attempting increases, and people who could never have attempted them before can now try.

Companies will need more senior engineers, not fewer

The senior engineers on my team have gotten busier over the past year. An AI tool can produce a working chunk of code in seconds, but it tends to make mistakes that only an experienced person can spot, so someone has to go through what it writes and fix it before it ships. That review and correction now takes up much of a senior engineer’s day, and it requires more skill than writing the code from scratch.

The hiring data points in the same direction:

Employment for developers aged 22 to 25 fell to close to 20% below its 2022 peak by mid-2025, while developers aged 30 and over in the same AI-exposed roles saw their employment grow by 6 to 12%.
Software engineering jobs are growing overall, with demand concentrating among experienced engineers who can shape what gets built.
Entry-level hiring at the 15 biggest tech firms dropped 25% from 2023 to 2024, as routine work that once trained juniors was handed over to AI.

That last figure is the part I find genuinely hard. Writing simple code under supervision taught people the craft, and AI now does that work well. I can’t yet say what replaces that first step on the ladder, and I’d be wary of anyone who tells you they can.

It reaches past software

Work is changing shape as this goes well beyond tech companies.

I help run a music festival. It earns thin margins and runs on volunteers, the kind of work people take on because it gives other people a few days they remember for years.

Its name was invented by an AI. For the next one, I have one system that builds and tracks the budget, and another that handles booking and logistics, including flights, hotels, and transfers. The festival still happens in a field full of real people, doing something software cannot do for them. What changed is that running it now includes directing a set of tools that used to handle work I handled by hand. The job gained a layer.

The human stays, the surrounding work gets lighter

The same pattern holds across most of what I look at. The person at the center stays. The work around them gets cheaper and faster.

Spreadsheets did not remove accountants. They took over the arithmetic and the copying, and left the accountant with the judgment calls. Property management works the same way. The boiler still breaks, and someone still comes to fix it. The invoicing, scheduling, and back-and-forth to get an answer all get quicker and cheaper.

The work that needs a person stays where it is. What lands on top is the job of directing everything that now runs on its own, and spotting when it goes wrong.

A note from the front of it

Here is the honest position from someone watching this happen early. It is an odd place to be. You don’t yet know what will hold and what won’t, which makes the work interesting and sometimes uncomfortable.

For most people already established in a job, the work is not being taken away. It is picking up territory that no one has written a manual for, and the people doing it are working that out as they go. The sensible move is to get ready for the larger version of your role rather than brace for its disappearance.