People regularly ask me whether AI is going to replace developers. The question is backwards. On my projects, AI hasn’t removed a single skill. It moved a constraint I had taken for granted for ten years: my own time.
The real ceiling was never the code
When you build a serious line-of-business application alone or in a pair, what caps your output isn’t typing speed. It’s the number of hours a human can sustain in a week without breaking quality. A small editor spends their life arbitrating: this week I wire up that integration, so I don’t touch the billing module; this quarter I push a certification through, so the mobile rework waits.
Simon Willison puts it well in a recent post: if AI hasn’t triggered a wave of developer layoffs, it’s because coding is only a small part of the job. Out of 160 companies that filed layoff notices in New York in 2025, “not a single one checked the AI box.” Deciding what to build, specifying it, verifying it, being accountable for what you ship, understanding the business context, none of that automates.
I agree. But I draw a slightly different conclusion than he does. If code is only a small part of the job, then accelerating the code doesn’t change the nature of the work, it changes its capacity. And for a small outfit, capacity is almost everything.
What it concretely changes
Three things shifted in the way I work.
Scoping. I used to instinctively drop the “correct but expensive” features: the clean degraded mode, the monitoring, the integration tests on an external feed. Not out of laziness, out of a time budget. Today the marginal cost of doing it right has dropped. I wire in the safety net because writing it no longer costs me half a day.
Pricing. A fixed-price quote is a bet on time. When the output ceiling rises, the same scope ships faster, or a more ambitious scope fits the same envelope. That doesn’t mean billing less; it means delivering more value for the price, and moving on to the next job sooner.
Running the project. More back-and-forth with the client, and earlier. Mocking up a variant in an afternoon instead of a week means being able to say “look, here’s what it looks like” before freezing a decision. Velocity isn’t there to produce more lines; it’s there to shorten the loop between a business idea and something you can actually touch.
What it doesn’t change (and the anxiety that comes with it)
There’s another, darker reading going around among developers. A post that circulated recently tells the same story from the inside: ten years building deep expertise (finance, debugging, architecture) only to watch it become “promptable” in a few weeks. The anxiety isn’t unemployment, it’s the commoditization of mastery.
I understand the vertigo. But I think it conflates two things: knowing how, and knowing what to do and being accountable for it. AI makes the first abundant. The second (deciding, specifying, verifying, carrying responsibility for what ships to production on a sensitive system) stays rare, and stays mine.
The job doesn’t disappear. It moves up a notch: less production, more judgment.
Stepping back
Let me zoom out, owning that this is an opinion and not a proof.
There’s a lot of talk about France’s demographic problem: an inverting age pyramid, the large cohorts retiring, a thinner generation behind them. Public debate fixates on a single variable, the retirement age. It’s one variable among several. Producing more per head is another, and tooling that raises one worker’s capacity feeds directly into it.
I’m not claiming AI fixes demographics, that would be exactly the kind of marketing shortcut I spend my time criticizing. But when one worker can carry a volume of output that took two yesterday, it counts in the equation. It’s less divisive than moving an age slider, and probably more durable. Provided the gains go to the value produced, not to stacking tools for the sake of tooling.
Conclusion
AI didn’t replace my job. It removed the dumbest limit weighing on it: the fact that a day has twenty-four hours. What stays rare (deciding, specifying, verifying, being accountable) hasn’t moved an inch. That’s precisely where the value of an editor lives, solo or not.
If you run a company and you’re wondering where AI has a real effect rather than a cosmetic one, that’s exactly the kind of context we can look at together, and settle what genuinely deserves to be automated.