When people like Dario Amodei and Demis Hassabis and Elon Musk keep talking about the workforce being replaced by AI and robots, I’d been ignoring them just like everyone else. But in the back of my mind, I kept thinking: what if they know something I don’t? Surely they have access to things I don’t.
Then November happened.
The Warnings
The leaders building this technology are sounding alarms.
Dario Amodei, CEO of Anthropic, has been warning since May 2025 that AI could eliminate half of entry-level white-collar jobs within five years. He called it a potential “white-collar bloodbath” and pushed for transparency: “We, as the producers of this technology, have a duty and an obligation to be honest about what is coming. I don’t think this is on people’s radar.”
Elon Musk, at the U.S.-Saudi Investment Forum, predicted work will be optional in 10 to 20 years. “AI and robots will replace all jobs,” he said. “Working will be optional, like growing your own vegetables, instead of buying them from the store.”
At Davos last week, Demis Hassabis of Google DeepMind and Amodei appeared together and warned that AI is already impacting junior roles. “I think we’re going to see this year the beginnings of maybe it impacting the junior level,” Hassabis said. Entry-level jobs and internships appear most affected. “I think there is some evidence, I can feel that ourselves, maybe like a slowdown in hiring.”
These are serious people with serious concerns.
The November Awakening
Developers discovered the magic of Opus 4.5. A model so good that programmers finally realized the inevitable truth: AI was better than them at coding.
Consider this: Anthropic built Cowork, their new autonomous AI agent, in just 10 days. All the code was written by Claude Code. An AI coding tool built an AI productivity tool. In less than two weeks.
I experienced this firsthand. In 25 days, I built VibeIt.work, a platform for cataloging AI-built apps and the tools that make them possible. The numbers tell the story:
- 425 commits
- 107 features shipped
- 141 bugs squashed
- 17 releases
What started as a simple app portfolio evolved into something different. By day 6, I had shipped a resources feature. By day 13, unified search across everything. By day 19, batch import where you paste URLs and AI enriches them automatically. The AI handles the descriptions, the tags, the screenshots.
I wrote about the transition from prototype to production in From AI Prototype to Real App. The short version: chatbots can only take you so far. Eventually you need real tools, real persistence, real authentication. But the gap between “idea” and “working product” has collapsed.
This is what the new era looks like. Not programmers being replaced. Programmers shipping at rates that were impossible six months ago.
Enter ClawdBot
Over the weekend we saw something new: the evolution of Cowork. A tool called ClawdBot that is breaking the developer internet. The promise is simple: an autonomous agent that runs 24/7 on your behalf to handle things.
At first, it sounds like something you could do in a regular chatbot. What makes it powerful is the autonomy.
When I finished recording my upcoming course on Cowork, I realized something. It’s already capable of making connections and inferences across documents that is basically inhuman. Impossible for people to do manually.
I realized the same thing that happened to programmers in November is going to happen to the rest of the world soon.
The Mac Mini Phenomenon
People started buying Mac Minis to run these assistants in their homes, causing a rush on the machines. The GitHub stars on ClawdBot exploded from 5,000 to nearly 20,000 in days.
But here’s where it gets weirder. You can run ClawdBot by renting a server for about $5/month. It can sit there and monitor your social feeds, letting you know when something interesting happens. It can browse Amazon looking for deals on tools. Analyze your documents after you’ve created them, offering corrections and planning out a social media strategy for marketing a product.
For that price, you can have a swarm of agents. A virtual digital workforce that is constantly researching, analyzing, double-checking, and strategizing.
But Here’s Where I Disagree
Chaos? Turmoil? Mass layoffs?
I don’t think so, because that’s not what’s happening with developers.
Look at what actually happened after Opus 4.5 dropped. Programmers didn’t lose their jobs. They evolved. They’re using these tools to write faster, better-tested code and deploy at rates unimaginable before. Just like with radio and television and every medium that was supposed to be replaced by something new, programming evolved.
This is where Satya Nadella and Demis Hassabis have it right.
Satya Nadella, CEO of Microsoft, invoked Jevons’ paradox: “As AI gets more efficient and accessible, we will see its use skyrocket, turning it into a commodity we just can’t get enough of.”
Jevons’ paradox applies here. Every time we figure out a way to be more efficient, we want more of it, not less. It sounds counterproductive, but we’re going to have more developers. Not the traditional ones, but the ones who have mastered how to use AI.
Stanford economist Erik Brynjolfsson pointed to what happened with airplane pilots when jets were invented. They became dramatically more productive. Did that mean we needed fewer pilots? No. We decided to fly more. Demand for pilots went up.
Hassabis agrees. At SXSW London, he said we’re entering a period like the ’90s: “it was the internet, and mobile, and gaming. I think we’re in another one of those eras. So they’re very exciting, but you’ve got to be very nimble and embrace the new technologies that are coming down the line.”
The Pattern Repeats
This is the way every revolution has worked. Print to desktop publishing. Radio to TV. The internet. And now AI.
Workers will go through a period of adjustment. That’s real. But then they’ll quickly shift to evolve with the new capabilities. Things will happen faster, but humanity is resilient.
We will never be replaced.
Work is a joyful endeavor. People are always going to do things. Build things. Create things. Solve problems. That’s who we are. The difference now is that our abilities are multiplied.
Don’t make the mistake of sulking about the changes. Master the process and don’t look back. You’ll be in more demand than ever.
