AI Is Not Killing Jobs. It's Doing Something Far Stranger

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Two headlines landed this week that seem to contradict each other.

One says AI is creating jobs. The other says humans have stopped doing theirs.

Both are true. And that tension — if you sit with it long enough — says something important about where we actually are.

The Company That's Hiring Everyone

IBM is a $240 billion tech giant. Not a startup betting on optimism. Not a PR stunt. A company with 270,000 employees that just announced it will triple its entry-level hiring in the US this year.

"And yes," said Nickle LaMoreaux, IBM's chief HR officer, "that is for software developers and all these jobs we're being told AI can do."

The jobs still exist. But they look nothing like before.

An entry-level developer at IBM two years ago spent 34 hours a week coding. Now they spend that time talking to clients, working with marketing teams, and building new products — while AI handles the routine code.

LaMoreaux put it plainly: "The entry-level jobs that you had two to three years ago, AI can do most of them. You have to rewrite every job."

IBM isn't being naive about this. They're making a calculated long-term bet. If you stop hiring juniors today, you won't have mid-level managers in five years. And poaching experienced talent from the outside costs 30% more — and they don't know your culture.

So they're hiring. Just for different work.

The Company Where No One Writes Code Anymore

The same week, Spotify's co-CEO Gustav Söderström said something on an earnings call that should stop every knowledge worker in their tracks.

"When I speak to my most senior engineers — the best developers we have — they actually say that they haven't written a single line of code since December."

Not junior engineers. The best ones.

Here's how it works: Spotify built an internal system called Honk, powered by Claude Code. An engineer wakes up, opens Slack on their phone during their morning commute, types a message — "fix this bug in the iOS app" or "add this feature" — and by the time they arrive at the office, Claude has written the code, built a new version of the app, and sent it back for review. The engineer merges it to production before sitting down at their desk.

Söderström's framing was confident: "There is going to have to be a lot of change in these tech companies if you want to stay competitive. We are absolutely hell-bent on leading that change."

Spotify shipped over 50 new features in 2025. The system is working. The engineers aren't going anywhere — but what they do all day has fundamentally changed.

The Uncomfortable Middle Ground

Here's what's easy to miss when you read these two stories separately.

IBM is creating more jobs by redesigning what entry-level work means in the AI era. Spotify's senior engineers are still employed — but they've stopped doing the central task that defined their profession for decades.

These are not contradictory. They are two points on the same curve.

The curve goes like this: AI doesn't eliminate the human. It eliminates the task. And when the task disappears, you either find a new reason to exist in the role — or the role quietly contracts around you until it disappears too.

IBM is consciously managing that curve by redesigning jobs before AI makes them irrelevant. Spotify is living it in real time, discovering what senior engineers actually do when the code writes itself.

Neither company has fully figured it out. Söderström admitted as much: "The tricky thing is that we're in the middle of the change, so you also have to be very agile. The things you build now may be useless in a month."

What This Actually Means For You

If you're not a software engineer, you might think this doesn't apply to you.

It does.

Every role that involves producing something — writing, analysis, research, customer communication, design — is already on the same trajectory. AI handles more of the production. The human shifts toward judgment, context, relationships, and oversight.

That shift is not automatically bad. IBM's case makes the argument that it can even be better — that junior developers doing client work and strategic thinking will be more valuable five years from now than those who spent three years maintaining legacy code.

But the shift is not automatic. It requires someone — a company, a manager, an individual — to consciously redesign what the job is for.

Most organizations are not doing that.

They're hoping the situation clarifies before they have to make a decision.

It won't.

The Job That Rewrites Itself

Within 18 months, "AI fluency" will stop being a bonus skill on a resume and become a baseline requirement — the same way "proficient in Microsoft Office" was in 2005. The difference is that this time, the bar will keep moving.

It won't be enough to know how to use the tools. Companies will start filtering for people who know how to think with them. IBM is already redesigning jobs around that assumption. Most companies haven't started yet.

The Pattern No One Is Naming

Dropbox quietly announced it's expanding its internship and graduate programs by 25% in 2026 — citing younger workers' AI proficiency as the reason. Their chief people officer called it: "It's like they're biking in the Tour de France and the rest of us still have training wheels."

IBM. Dropbox. Two large companies moving in the same direction at the same time. That's not a coincidence. That's a pattern. And patterns, in the middle of a transition, are the only reliable signal.

The Question That Lasts

Every major shift in the history of work produced the same debate. The printing press would destroy scribes. The assembly line would eliminate craftsmen. The spreadsheet would make accountants obsolete.

None of those predictions were entirely wrong. And none of them were entirely right.

What actually happened, every time, was more complicated and more human than the headline suggested. Some roles disappeared. New ones emerged that nobody had imagined. The people who adapted earliest didn't do it because they were smarter — they did it because they started asking different questions sooner.

IBM and Spotify are asking different questions.

The rest of us are still reading the headlines.

One Question Before You Go

IBM is rewriting every job description. Spotify's engineers are supervising AI from their phones on the way to work.

The question isn't whether your role is changing.

It's whether you're the one deciding what it changes into — or whether you're waiting for someone else to decide for you.

I read and reply to every email. Let me know which side you're on.

You read the whole thing. That already puts you ahead.

Forward this to someone who still thinks AI and jobs is a simple story. It isn't. And the sooner we stop treating it like one, the better equipped we'll be to navigate what's actually happening.

And if there's a topic you'd like us to dig into next — something you're seeing, a question you can't shake, a trend that doesn't quite make sense yet — hit reply and tell us. We read everything. And sometimes, the best issues start with a single email.

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