Why Managers Should Fear AI, Not Programmers

Over the past few years, we've seen massive layoffs at big companies. The most common explanation you hear is: "With AI, we don't need so many programmers anymore." This has even hit some of my own friends. I got lucky — I ended up in a completely different situation. For the last 1.5 years, my team has been actively experimenting with various AI tools. We've tried Gemini, Codex, Claude, and a few less hyped ones. We've been constantly implementing and refining the best practices for working with AI. Our goal was simple and obvious: to increase the productivity of the development team. And we're succeeding. During this time, Claude has effectively become a standard development tool — right alongside PHPStorm or GitLab. But despite all of AI's breakthroughs, we didn't reduce the number of programmers. On the contrary — we now have more of them. Why? Because we still need to ship features. We still need to write code. For our project, AI isn't a way to cut headcount — it's a way to creat