Enis Arik

Software engineering in 2026 is absurd. Developers pay $100/month for AI tools to write half the code. Companies still pay them $10k+/month to ship. So now grown adults are making six figures… by reviewing AI output, drinking coffee, and saying “looks good to me.” And somehow we all pretend this isn’t happening. What a time to be alive.

Had drinks with 30 CTOs last night at an off-the-record gathering in Palo Alto Every single one showed me the same internal PowerPoint slide "2026 AI Headcount Targets: Path to 70% Cost Reduction" The numbers will make you physically sick Fintech CTO planning to cut 280-person engineering org down to 43 "AI orchestrators" by September. Same product roadmap. Same delivery expectations. Healthcare CTO already eliminated his entire manual QA department. 67 people. Replaced with 3 senior engineers running autonomous testing agents that ship code directly to production. SaaS CTO walked me through his "human depreciation timeline": 340 engineers today, 89 planned for 2027. Customer support going from 120 humans to 12 "escalation specialists" managing AI conversations. The most chilling part: they're all using the exact same consulting deck from McKinsey called "The 30% Organization" One CTO literally said "hiring humans for code is like hiring horses for transportation" Another showed me Slack screenshots where his L7s are asking if they should train their replacements The consensus was unanimous: if you can't manage 10 AI agents by Christmas, you're not making it to New Year's Every single one of them is planning to announce these cuts as "AI transformation success stories" While their stock options vest at record highs built on the backs of workers they're about to execute The future of engineering is 3 humans with 50 AI agents in a WeWork somewhere while 500 families lose their homes

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