K’s reality may shock some, considering that the
U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics has consistently labeled software engineering as one of the fastest growing fields, but stories like his may soon become all more common.
Earlier this year, the CEO of Anthropic Dario Amodei predicted that more software jobs will soon go by the wayside. By September, he said AI will be writing 90% of the code; moreover, “in 12 months, we may be in a world where AI is writing essentially all of the code,” he
tells the
Council on Foreign Relations.
In 2024, over 150,000 tech workers lost their jobs, and so far in 2025, that number has reached over 50,000, according to
Layoffs.fyi. “It’s coming for basically everyone in due time, and we are already overdue for proposing any real solution in society to heading off the worst of these effects,” K wrote.
“The discussion of AI job replacement in the mainstream is still viewed as something coming in the vague future rather than something that’s already underway.”
Losing his job isn’t the only issue
Despite being unemployed for over a year, K still hasn’t lost hope, nor is he necessarily mad at AI for replacing him and still calls himself an “AI maximalist.”
"If AI really legitimately can do a better job than me, I'm not gonna sit here and feel bad about, oh, it replaced me and it doesn't have the human touch,” K says.
What’s frustrating, he adds, is that companies are using AI to save money by cutting talent—rather than leveraging its power and embracing
cyborg workers.
“I think there's this problem where people are stuck in the old world business mindset of, well, if I can do the same work that 10 developers were doing with one developer, let's just cut the developer team instead of saying, oh, well, we've got a 10 developer team, let's do 1,000x the work that we were doing before,” K says.
This story was originally featured on
Fortune.com