A few months ago, in the same week, I read two headlines that had no business existing at the same time. One was about a company bragging that its engineers had basically stopped writing code — AI was doing it for them. The other was about a different company quietly rehiring the senior engineers it had laid off a year earlier, because the AI-built version of their product kept shipping bugs a human would have caught in code review. I run mock interviews for engineers trying to land their next role, and I teach backend development on this channel, so I hear both sides of this panic constantly — from people worried AI is about to make their job irrelevant, and from hiring managers quietly telling me the opposite. I wanted to stop going off vibes and actually dig into what was happening with real numbers. What I found didn't fit neatly into either the "AI is taking our jobs" camp or the "AI is overhyped nonsense" camp. It's stranger than both, and honestly...
A few months ago, in the same week, I read two headlines that had no business existing at the same time. One was about a company bragging that its engineers had basically stopped writing code — AI was doing it for them. The other was about a different company quietly rehiring the senior engineers it had laid off a year earlier, because the AI-built version of their product kept shipping bugs a human would have caught in code review. I run mock interviews for engineers trying to land their next role, and I teach backend development on this channel, so I hear both sides of this panic constantly — from people worried AI is about to make their job irrelevant, and from hiring managers quietly telling me the opposite. I wanted to stop going off vibes and actually dig into what was happening with real numbers. What I found didn't fit neatly into either the "AI is taking our jobs" camp or the "AI is overhyped nonsense" camp. It's stranger than both, and honestly...
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