Are you willing to pay $100k a year per developer on AI?

Summary

Bosses throughout the world love the idea of using AI to replace employees. They can talk all they want about how much more efficient everyone will be with AI, but the truth is if they can fire staffers, their bottom line looks better, their stock price goes up, and the CEO makes a ton more money. It's a win-win if your title starts with a C or you're a stockholder. Companies deny they're doing this, of course. Take Microsoft, for example. CEO Satya Nadella claims AI tools like GitHub Copilot now write up to 30 percent of Microsoft’s software code. Simultaneously, Microsoft has laid off over 15,000 people, nearly 7% of its workforce. Coincidence? I think not. The funds Microsoft is saving from all its ex-staffers are helping to pay for Microsoft's spending $75-80 billion on its AI CapEx this year. There's only one little problem with all this. This presumes that 1) AI can successfully get work done and 2) AI will keep being cheaper. As for the first, of course, AI can replace some workers. Call center help staff? Maybe. That may not save as much money as company executives think. We've been shipping call center jobs offshore for decades. This is another step in a long-established work pattern. There's nothing new here. The real savings, though, is to get rid of developers, engineers, designers, you know, people like you and me. Once you've separated the truth from the chaff of AI hype-spam, the evidence that AI can really deliver value becomes much less clear. I find it telling that, according to the 2025 Stack Overflow Developer Survey, 84 percent of programmers now use or plan to use AI tools in their workflows. 46 percent of AI-using developers don’t trust their results. And, even more interestingly as AI developer tools have been "improving," programmers are trusting them less than ever. Why? Because instead of writing code, they’re spending - wasting? - a ton of time fixing AI coding blunders. This is not a productive use of mid-level, never mind senior, progra...