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The Dumbest Move in Tech Right Now: Laying Off Developers Because of AI
(ppaolo.substack.com)
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this post was submitted on 20 May 2025
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Programming
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This is so fucking sad to acknowledge that a lot of people just want to squeeze any profit left in the industry, even though they know AI is a great tool for developers, not a replacement. They must know that because anyone who can access it can replicate the same things, making these products uncompetitive.
AI isn't a great tool for developers. It's a great tool for mitigating the knowledge gap between an individual's academic understanding of a development project and the syntax involved in the language they are attempting to deploy.
As the number of programming languages has proliferated faster than the volume of developers versed in each language, and the older languages have lost much of their professional base to retirement and layoffs, we've needed increasingly elaborate tools to fill in the skills gaps.
But AI doesn't fix the underlying problem of an increasingly large backlog of code desperately in need of refactor or replacement. It just papers over the problem with a cheat-sheet of simple conversions that junior developers can leverage to liter the next iteration of the codebase with bandaids.
A proper solution to our coding backlog would be educational first and foremost. We need more rigorously enforced orthodox approaches to coding. We need more backwards compatibility between systems. We need to refine the number of languages in active use and narrow the size and scope of their libraries. We need a more universalist approach to building and maintaining database schemas, digital communications, and business practices. We need a publicly funded open source community of developers to build the backbone of software into the 21st century.
What we're producing is the opposite of that. Less rigor. Fewer recognizable standards. Less training. Poorer code hygiene and weaker enforcement of best practices. More bugs. So many more bugs. And enormous volumes of legacy code that nobody will be able to maintain - or even understand - in another twenty years.