The thing nobody wants to say out loud: this 12,000 is just the warmup. And it is not “the market,” it is people who shipped the wrong way for too long. People whose skills cost too much per feature shipped, per ticket closed, per campaign launched. People who tried to scale headcount instead of leverage.
If your team’s main superpower is “we work hard in Notion and Slack,” you’re in the blast radius.
Look at what is actually happening, not the PR. Every board deck now has the same hidden slide: “Headcount vs A.I. leverage.” That is code for “Who here can ship 3x more with half the people, and who still needs five humans to do what one person plus a model can handle?”
If you cannot answer “what’s our cost per feature, and how does A.I. cut it this quarter,” you are the cost.
Founders who raised on vibes in 2021 are now getting told to extend runway without more capital. There are only two knobs: grow revenue or kill burn. Most SaaS outfits are not spinning up net-new revenue in one quarter. So they go straight to burn. Burn means roles. Roles mean you and your team.
The pattern is already obvious:
– Senior IC who builds their own A.I. tools: safe-ish.
– Manager who just routes Jira tickets: not.
– Marketer who can wire an A.I.-driven funnel and measure the hell out of it: safe-ish.
– “Ideas person” who needs a designer, copywriter, and dev to do anything: gone.
This is not about replacing “developers” or “marketers” in general. It is about replacing humans who don’t control their own leverage stack. If you still depend on someone else to automate your job, that someone else is your replacement.
The scary part: your leadership is probably behind too. Most startup execs are still acting like A.I. is a side project or a hackathon theme. Meanwhile, the few who get it are quietly re-architecting teams around one brutal question: “If every strong player here had an A.I. exoskeleton, which weak players become obviously unnecessary?”
You can feel it in how work gets scoped. Tasks that used to be “two weeks” are now “can you get a first pass by this afternoon using tools?” If your answer is “uh, I don’t know how,” they might not say anything today. They will remember at review time.
There is a small window where you can flip from “cost center” to “force multiplier.” But it is not a course, and it is not a cert. It is you getting uncomfortably close to the tools, breaking some stuff, and proving you personally can cut unit cost per shipped thing.
Do nothing, and you’re betting your salary that your CEO is too scared to do what every other CEO is already doing. Good luck with that.