I’ve noticed teams don’t replace engineers, they redistribute work. Senior engineers often gain leverage while junior roles shift toward tooling and review.
I still feel like with all of these tools I as a senior engineer have to keep a close eye on what they're doing. Like an exuberant junior (myself 10 years ago), inevitably they still go off the rails and I need to reign them in. They still make the occasional security or performance flaw - often which can be resolved by pointing it out.
I am very tired of seeing every random person's speculation (framed as real insight) on what's going to happen as they try to signify that they are super involved in AI and super on top of it and therefore still worthy of value and importance in the economy.
The main thing to understand about the impact of AI tools:
Somehow the more senior you are [in the field of use], the better results you get. You can run faster and get more done! If you're good, you get great results faster. If you're bad, you get bad results faster.
You still gotta understand what you're doing. GeLLMan Amnesia is real.
Senior dev here 15 years experience just turned 50 have family blah blah. I've been contracting for the last two years. The org is just starting to use Claude. I've been delegating - well copy pasting - into chatgpt which has to be the laziest way to leverage AI. I've been so successful (meaning haven't had to do anything really except argue with chatgpt when it goes off on some tangent) with this approach that I can't even be bothered to set up my Claude environment. I swear when this contract is over I'm opening a mobile food cart.
Fellow old here… Sorry to tell you but robotic food carts are going to be impossible to compete against
So you’ll need some kind of humanistic hook if you want to get reliable customers
Expect there will be two worlds that are extremely different: the machine world of efficiency that most people live inside as gears of machine capitalism
The biological world where there’s no efficiencies and it’s primarily hunter gatherers with mystical rituals
The latter one is only barely still the majority worldwide (only 25-30% of humans aren’t on the internet)
It's puzzling to me that all this theorizing doesn't just look at the actual effects of AI. It's very non-intuitive
For example the fact that AI can code as well as Torvalds doesn't displace his economic value. On the contrary he pays for a subscription so he can vibe code!
The actual work AI has displaced is stuff like: freelance translation, graphic illustration, 'content writing' (writing seo optimized pages for Google) etc. That's instructive I suppose. Like if your income source can already be put on upwork then AI can displace it
So even in those cases there are ways to not be displaced. Like diplomatic translation work can be part of a career rather than just a task so the tool doesn't replace your 'job'.
Important to note that this article is specifically about chip design engineering jobs - it's on an industry publication called Semiconductor Engineering.
"Most people who drive cars now couldn’t find the radiator cap if they were paid to, and that’s fine."
That's not fine IMO. That is a basic bit of knowledge about a car and if you don't know where the radiator cap is you will eventually have to pay through the nose to someone who does know (and possibly be stranded somewhere). Knowing how to check and fill coolant isn't like knowing how to rebuild a transmission. It's very simple and anyone can understand it in 5 minutes if they only have the curiosity.
James Burke's old TV show Connections was all about this, how many little things that surround us in day to day life and on which we absolutely depend for our survival are complete black boxes to most of us most of the time. Part of modernity is that no single person, however intelligent, can really understand the technological web that sustains our lives.
"in the 1920s and 1930s, to be able to drive a car you needed to understand things like spark advance, and you needed to know how to be able to refill the radiator halfway through your trip"
A car still feels weirdly grounded in reality though, and the abstractions needed to understand it aren't too removed from nature (metal gets mined from rocks, forged into engine, engine blows up gasoline, radiator cools engine).
The idea that as tech evolves humans just keep riding on top of more and more advanced abstractions starts to feel gross at a certain point. That point is some of this AI stuff for me. In the same way that driving and working on an old car feels kind of pure, but driving the newest auto pilot computer screen car where you have never even popped the hood feels gross.
Let's presume / speculate for a moment that companies will only need 1 developer to do the job of 10 developers because of AI. That would also mean 10 developers can do the job of 100 developers.
A company that cuts developers to save money whose moat is not big enough may quickly find themselves out-competed by a company that sees this as an opportunity to overtake their competitor. They will have to hire more developers to keep their product / service competitive.
So whether you believe the hype or not, I don't think engineering jobs are in jeopardy long-run, just cyclically as they always have been. They "might" be in jeopardy for those who don't use AI, but even as it stands, there are a lot of niche things out there that AI completely bombs on.
This sounds good in theory, but have you hired someone in 2026?
Developers are really lazy in general and don't want to work. The more people you hire, the more you run into the chance of gumming up productivity with unproductive developers.
Even if they are productive, once you cross the threshold of 30 people even productive developers become lazy because of entitlement, bad resource distribution, or complexities from larger teams.
We don't even have to talk about teams of 1000+. Ownership is just dead at that point.
In 2026, having just 5 engineers with AI means you can cut through all the waste and get stuff done. If they start being weird, you can see it pretty easily vs. when engineers are being weird in a team of 50-1000+.
It's not rocket science to see leadership decide to cut down on teams to better manage weirdness in devs. More people doesn't mean more results unfortunately because of work culture nowadays.
This sounds like a rant from a dysfunctional out of touch manager more than anything. From a 57 day old account here to pump AI because humans are terrible and not printing you lambos. Totally not a shill or anything. Humans = bad AI = good. Shill.
When you area asked specifics about how you use AI so effectively when others cannot you do not reply. Shill.
I've hired close to 200 people and 4 were bad apples that I had to fire. So no real life does not reflect what you wrote. Most people want to do a good job.
I don't think it necessarily scales that way. Larger organizations need more communication channels and coordination. If anything, assuming AI does give you 10x ability, there's probably a sweet spot where you have just enough developers that churn out code at a good pace but not too many that it gets too chaotic.
If you compare one developer to 10, for instance, one developer doesn't have to deal with communicating with 9 other people to make sure they're working on things that align with the work everyone else is doing. There is no consensus that has to be reached. No meetings, no messages that have to be relayed, no delays because someone wasn't around to get approval. That one developer just makes a decision and does it.
There are lots of big companies out there and in the past, small startups have been able to create successful products that never would have been created at the big company even though the big company hired way more developers.
I'm going to call BS on that chart of "AI-driven chip design". What "AI" tools has Cadence been providing since 2021 that are reaching 40-50% of "chip design" (what does that even mean?). Is AI here just any old algorithmic auto-router? Or a fuzzy search of the IP library?
I see some evidence that hardware roles expect you to leverage AI tools but not sure why it'd eliminate junior roles. I expect the bar on what you can do raise at every level.
Technologist, ASIC Development Engineering – Sandisk
…CPU complex, DDR, Host, Flash, Debug, Clocks, resets, Power domains etc. Familiarity in leveraging AI tools, including GitHub Copilot, for design and development.
37 comments
[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 49.6 ms ] threadI fear the true impact is much different than extrapolating current trends.
Somehow the more senior you are [in the field of use], the better results you get. You can run faster and get more done! If you're good, you get great results faster. If you're bad, you get bad results faster.
You still gotta understand what you're doing. GeLLMan Amnesia is real.
So you’ll need some kind of humanistic hook if you want to get reliable customers
Expect there will be two worlds that are extremely different: the machine world of efficiency that most people live inside as gears of machine capitalism
The biological world where there’s no efficiencies and it’s primarily hunter gatherers with mystical rituals
The latter one is only barely still the majority worldwide (only 25-30% of humans aren’t on the internet)
It's why Elon and others had been pushing the Fed to lower them.
Am in my late 40s working in tech since the 90s. The tech job economy is way closer to the pre-2010s.
Whole lot of people who jumped into easy office job money still living in 2019.
For example the fact that AI can code as well as Torvalds doesn't displace his economic value. On the contrary he pays for a subscription so he can vibe code!
The actual work AI has displaced is stuff like: freelance translation, graphic illustration, 'content writing' (writing seo optimized pages for Google) etc. That's instructive I suppose. Like if your income source can already be put on upwork then AI can displace it
So even in those cases there are ways to not be displaced. Like diplomatic translation work can be part of a career rather than just a task so the tool doesn't replace your 'job'.
What impact, what expectation, how uncertain is this assessment of “may be”? Are you feeling understimulated enough to click and find out?
That's not fine IMO. That is a basic bit of knowledge about a car and if you don't know where the radiator cap is you will eventually have to pay through the nose to someone who does know (and possibly be stranded somewhere). Knowing how to check and fill coolant isn't like knowing how to rebuild a transmission. It's very simple and anyone can understand it in 5 minutes if they only have the curiosity.
A car still feels weirdly grounded in reality though, and the abstractions needed to understand it aren't too removed from nature (metal gets mined from rocks, forged into engine, engine blows up gasoline, radiator cools engine).
The idea that as tech evolves humans just keep riding on top of more and more advanced abstractions starts to feel gross at a certain point. That point is some of this AI stuff for me. In the same way that driving and working on an old car feels kind of pure, but driving the newest auto pilot computer screen car where you have never even popped the hood feels gross.
An ongoing desire to avoid paying engineers... FTFY
A company that cuts developers to save money whose moat is not big enough may quickly find themselves out-competed by a company that sees this as an opportunity to overtake their competitor. They will have to hire more developers to keep their product / service competitive.
So whether you believe the hype or not, I don't think engineering jobs are in jeopardy long-run, just cyclically as they always have been. They "might" be in jeopardy for those who don't use AI, but even as it stands, there are a lot of niche things out there that AI completely bombs on.
Developers are really lazy in general and don't want to work. The more people you hire, the more you run into the chance of gumming up productivity with unproductive developers.
Even if they are productive, once you cross the threshold of 30 people even productive developers become lazy because of entitlement, bad resource distribution, or complexities from larger teams.
We don't even have to talk about teams of 1000+. Ownership is just dead at that point.
In 2026, having just 5 engineers with AI means you can cut through all the waste and get stuff done. If they start being weird, you can see it pretty easily vs. when engineers are being weird in a team of 50-1000+.
It's not rocket science to see leadership decide to cut down on teams to better manage weirdness in devs. More people doesn't mean more results unfortunately because of work culture nowadays.
According to Larry Wall, the three great virtues of programmers are laziness, impatience, and hubris.
Though perhaps perl isn't a great argument for the latter.
https://thethreevirtues.com
When you area asked specifics about how you use AI so effectively when others cannot you do not reply. Shill.
I've hired close to 200 people and 4 were bad apples that I had to fire. So no real life does not reflect what you wrote. Most people want to do a good job.
If you compare one developer to 10, for instance, one developer doesn't have to deal with communicating with 9 other people to make sure they're working on things that align with the work everyone else is doing. There is no consensus that has to be reached. No meetings, no messages that have to be relayed, no delays because someone wasn't around to get approval. That one developer just makes a decision and does it.
There are lots of big companies out there and in the past, small startups have been able to create successful products that never would have been created at the big company even though the big company hired way more developers.
I see some evidence that hardware roles expect you to leverage AI tools but not sure why it'd eliminate junior roles. I expect the bar on what you can do raise at every level.
Example job mentioning AI: https://jobs.smartrecruiters.com/Sandisk/744000104267635-tec...
Technologist, ASIC Development Engineering – Sandisk …CPU complex, DDR, Host, Flash, Debug, Clocks, resets, Power domains etc. Familiarity in leveraging AI tools, including GitHub Copilot, for design and development.
Entry level: https://job-boards.greenhouse.io/spacex/jobs/8390171002?gh_j...
I've seen the kind of mistakes that entry level employees make. Trust me, they will, and they will be bigger, worse mistakes.