Battle to the RIF

After 1,600 years, the Roman amphitheaters have reopened. A long-simmering rivalry has finally reached the arena: with the advent of AI, it’s business leaders versus software engineers.

My money’s on the engineers.

Businesses think they can ship digital products without technical staff, while engineers think they can launch companies without the “stuffed shirts.” Who’s right, and who will actually keep their careers and customers?

The engineers have an edge for three main reasons:

1. Engineers built the new AI tools in the first place.
2. Most business leaders still don’t grasp what these tools actually mean.
3. Business leaders aren’t thinking big enough.

Competent engineers have dreamed for years of circumventing corporate bureaucracy once and for all by building their own SaaS products. Now, they have a clear pathway: agentic AI assistants can finally support the tedious business tasks engineers have avoided their entire careers—market research, customer validation, rapid prototyping, lead generation, brand development, marketing, forecasting, accounting, trend analysis, fundraising, and more.

There will be fewer developers, not more

Tech CEOs love to claim “everyone will be a programmer in the future,” but that’s hard to believe as the skill gap widens and the tools grow more powerful.

“Software engineer” is a title that must be earned. Junior developer roles are disappearing, which means the pipeline that once produced seasoned developers is drying up. Much like the path from pre-med student to practicing physician—where you can’t safely treat patients until you know a ton—software development requires the same depth of training to produce qualified engineers.

Developers need many years of practice to accurately interpret AI-generated code. Those without that foundation will quickly get themselves into trouble.

So there will be fewer competent developers, yet they may actually be in higher demand as amateurs try to build software without fully understanding the underlying systems. As Harvey Danger put it: “You don’t have to be a genius, but it helps to.”

Only through rigor will anyone succeed in this new landscape of generated content and deployed code. Everything remains shaky and unproven until it’s formalized, validated, and tested. The funny thing is, this isn’t a new idea at all. It’s just plain, old, boring science.

How can you survive?

The fundamentals of business and engineering haven’t changed just because a new tool arrived. You just need to learn the new tool.

You cannot outrun complexity. The tech jobs of tomorrow, including those that used to be traditional business roles, will belong to those who truly understand what they’ve built (and what the AI has built for them.)