I opened Layoffs.fyi this week and the number stopped me: over 113,000 people laid off in tech in 2026 alone — an average of about 825 a day, a pace 33% higher than the same period in 2025. And the headline detail: nearly half of those cuts cite AI as a factor. Meta, Cisco, Oracle were explicit — cutting people while pushing AI adoption.
As someone who lives off coding, I could panic or go into denial. But the honest read lives in the middle — and there's an important catch almost nobody mentions.
"AI washing": not every cut is AI's fault
There's a phenomenon called "AI washing": a company that was going to cut anyway — high interest rates, pandemic over-hiring, a margin target — using AI as a nice narrative for the cut. I didn't make this up: Sam Altman himself admitted "there's some AI washing where people blame AI for layoffs they'd do anyway," and Deutsche Bank analysts wrote that "AI redundancy washing" would be a hallmark of 2026.
So the truth has two legs: AI is genuinely changing the work of people who code — but it has also become the convenient excuse for financial decisions that have nothing to do with language models. Mixing the two is what creates the wrong kind of panic.
What really changes for people who code
Cut the noise and one concrete shift remains, and it isn't new — it just accelerated: value is moving from "I write code" to "I ship outcomes."
- Writing code became a commodity faster. AI writes the boilerplate, the CRUD, the obvious test. Charging to type that by hand gets hard. Charging to solve the business problem doesn't.
- Those who understand the problem rise; those who only understand syntax sink. The hard part was always knowing what to build and why — AI doesn't take that from you, it gives you more leverage to do it.
- Owning an asset protects you. Selling hours alone leaves you exposed to a spreadsheet cut. Owning a product, an audience, a portfolio that works for you — that's what's left when the wind shifts.
What I do about it (in practice)
It's not just talk: it's what's on this site. I use AI as leverage to do more, and instead of only selling hours, I build tools and small products that stay online attracting people — browser-based transcription, a contract generator, vulnerability management. Each solves a real problem and introduces me to whoever needs it. It's the opposite of depending on one job opening: it's building your own asset, one brick at a time.
AI won't fire you. Whoever ships more outcomes with it in hand will take the seat of whoever doesn't. The good news is that's 100% in your control.
FAQ
Is AI really causing the layoffs? Partly. Nearly half of 2026's cuts cite AI (Layoffs.fyi), but there's a lot of "AI washing" — cuts a company would make anyway, with AI as the excuse (admitted by Sam Altman himself and Deutsche Bank analysts).
What should a dev do? Move value from "I write code" to "I ship outcomes": use AI as leverage, master the business problem, and if you can, build your own assets instead of only selling hours.
Sources: Layoffs.fyi, CNBC, Crunchbase News (2026 data).