AI - The end of work life as we know it.

Three Phases of AI, from a Developer Who's Been Staring at the Terminal the Whole Time

1. 2021-ish — “Look What It Can Do!”

  • First LLM demos felt like passing notes in class.
  • We threw riddles, dad jokes, and half-baked poems at the thing just to watch it spit something back.
  • Zero stakes, pure novelty. A sidekick that made Slack a little louder.

Takeaway: Fun toy, no impact on the sprint board yet.

2. 2023-2025 — “Ship Faster or Get Left Behind”

  • Copilot-style tools hit VS Code, and suddenly boilerplate died.
  • The model auto-writes tests, digs up docs faster than Google, even patches the linter errors it caused. LLMs team now available.

My real work now?

  • Explain requirements clearly.
  • Reject 30% of its first drafts.
  • Keep an eye on hidden side effects.
  • Biggest pain point: context juggling. I'm basically a project manager for a swarm of autocomplete ghosts.
  • Autocomplete ghosts kill boilerplate, write tests, squash lint.
  • Stop sleeping. The race is on. Anyone with 50$/month can have a “team” of AI devs. Anyone can do anything.
  • My just-out Gemini 2.5 pro CLI just got hacked when searching the web. Dull.

Takeaway: Productivity boost is insane, but only if you babysit the bot and know what “good” looks like. The role shrinks to rubber-stamp and damage-control. It helps to have a sense of what a team can ingest. I found myself trying to ensure human can keep track of what's going on.

3. 2026-? — “Capital Doesn't Need Coffee Breaks”

(now with sharper teeth and a thicker glossary)

  • Total ingestion. Every repo worth a dollar—from dorm-room SaaS to forty-year mega-suite—has been scraped, tokenized, and gradient-baked into a model somewhere.
  • Cloud feudalism. Hyperscalers rent out entire AI dev crews by the minute, priced like server-less functions. Your “team” is now an endpoint behind an API key.
  • Algorithmic Taylorism. Specs feed directly into multi-agent pipelines that architect, code, fuzz-test, and deploy without ever pinging a human Slack channel.
  • Zero marginal labor. HR overhead, sick days, onboarding—deleted from the P&L. Infinite lateral scale for pennies per run.
  • Feedback singularity. Each shipped build loops back as new training data; the model that replaces you tomorrow has already learned from the pull-request you merged today.
  • Culture scrape. Best practices, design patterns, domain folklore—distilled into vectors. Human devs become reference material, not participants.
  • Emergent personas. Give the pipeline a style guide and it grows a personality—agile coach, cranky ops veteran, pixel-perfect frontend diva—dial-a-culture on demand.
  • Obsolescence dividend. Shareholders capture the savings; displaced coders get nostalgia and maybe a stipend for prompt-engineering courses that will also be automated next quarter.

New Reality: A production house is nothing more than codified know-how. Centralized compute + proprietary models = monopoly on execution speed. Competing without that stack is like racing a supercar on foot.

Final Takeaway — No Sugar, Just Razor Wire

Full replacement isn't a debate; it's the default PowerPoint slide in every boardroom west of sanity.
It's the business plan.
The moment a swarm of models can push a feature faster than your typing latency, flesh-and-blood headcount is re-labeled “technical debt” and fed to the quarterly-earnings shredder.

Your Shrinking Lifeboats

  • Pivot to the un-modeled
    Crawl into niches the bots can't parse: solder smoke, export laws, ethics lawsuits, lab-coat edge physics.
    Shelf-life: 18–36 months, tops. Hardware gets abstracted; regulators love automation.

  • Gate-keep secret context
    Clutch that tribal knowledge—the one edge case that nukes prod, the data silo no one's mapped.
    Shelf-life: Until the next crawl. The moment it's labeled, you're cargo.

  • Cash out
    Sell equity, take sabbatical, buy a farm, crypto, freeze-dried beans—pick your apocalypse décor.
    Shelf-life: Works once. Hope you timed the exit.

Be Capital, or Be Collateral

When the middle class buckles, you'll hear the predictable chorus—think-pieces, protest hashtags, polite policy panels. Nice theater.
But surveillance economics plus precision-grade AI analytics = crowd control on autopilot.
Dissent becomes heat-map data; predictive policing patches the rest.

  • Work? Algorithmic bidding war—your wage vs. a GPU hour.
  • Privacy? An optional premium—like legroom, sold separately.
  • Democracy? Majority rule only matters when the majority can code its own tools. Spoiler: it can't.

The Exit Sign Is Neon-Red

Stay curious if it dulls the panic, but understand:

  • The lights are flickering.
  • The HVAC just shut off.
  • Security is walking the floor with a clipboard labeled “Resource Reclamation.”

Get out, morph, or be accept your obsolescence. Like "the day these monkeys typed semi-colons and adjusted their prettier config XD".


Thanks for reading!

We hope this article helped you understand you are about to loose your job. But hey, don't be a downer, you can always learn to prompt better!..?

Have a blast.