The Backlog Is Infinite

A friend asked me if my company is going to fire half of my team. He doesn’t write software. A few weeks earlier he had installed Claude Code, described an app he wanted, and got one. More or less. If he can do that knowing no programming at all, what does a company need a whole team of engineers for? I get some version of this question regularly now, almost always from friends outside of software. I’m not worried. But not for the reason they expect. The arithmetic is simple enough. Say we have a team of ten engineers, and AI makes each of them twice as productive. They now do the work of twenty. Fire five, keep the output you had before, save five salaries. That “twice as productive” is doing a lot of work, and I don’t take it as a given. Let’s assume it’s true anyway. The reasoning makes sense if engineering is a cost center. If software is something the company buys to keep the lights on – the internal tools, the reporting, the integration nobody outside the building will ever see…