How to stay relevant as a developer

We are seeing a trend in layoffs in perfectly healthy companies. Blocks laid off nearly half their staff, and it’s not because they can’t pay them:

Gross profit continues to grow… but something has changed. We're already seeing that the intelligence tools we're creating and using, paired with smaller and flatter teams, are enabling a new way of working which fundamentally changes what it means to build and run a company.

— Jack Dorsey

We’ve all heard it: AI is coming for your job. This looks like Exhibit A, doesn’t it?

There’s a real point buried in the hype. AI will happily eat the tedious, time-heavy parts of writing code. And if “I write code” is the entire value you bring, then AI is going to replace you.

But if you’d like to be better than that, here are a couple of ideas.

Ship faster

Instead of working less, put in the same effort and ship more. Teams will hit the same output with half the people, so you need to be twice as productive.

Efficiency doesn’t shrink demand; it expands it. The easier it is to build something, the more things your company will decide are "worth building." This is called Jevon's Paradox.

But don't ship AI slop

AI can write complex regex (so glad I never learned to do that) and can work with HTML canvas, but it's still a junior dev in many ways. Inefficient queries. Repetitive code.

LLMs lack context, even if you refine your claude.md. They often don't know that there's existing code they can reference to implement a similar functionality unless you've specified it. Maybe you want to structure your database schema for a feature you have in mind that isn't implemented yet.

Your job is to spec, review and keep the codebase quality high.

Expand your skillset, and collaborate less

Frontend devs can do backend now. Full stack devs can learn design. Instead of handing over your work for someone else to fill in the gaps, do it yourself. Write that API endpoint, design that error state. Less collaboration means less communication overhead for the team and more ownership for each team member. Be the driver.

You may feel like you have to ask someone's opinion before making a decision because "it's not your job". Then you are waiting on an answer. Then you disagree, and have a discussion. Whoever has the biggest ego wins, and now you've wasted four working days.

Learn design

AI still sucks at design. You can make it copy other designs. But to know which designs to copy requires taste — knowing what looks good, what doesn't, and why. Refactoring UI is the best resource out there to teach developers that.

Now that you have taste, use Magic Patterns to brainstorm design ideas using the /inspiration command.

In your coding assistant, install impeccable commands that will point out design issues and help you fix them. I usually start with /critique which tells me what's wrong and which commands to run next like /polish and /normalize.

Be your own manager

Ask yourself, what should I work on? What's the next best thing to do to push the business forward? In an era where we can use agents to build anything, what's left is deciding what to build and how.

Going back to the first point of shipping faster — your team lead can ship faster too. What's stopping them from using Claude instead of delegating to you?

You need to come up with your own ideas, find problems to solve, and prioritize. You're now a PM with agents as your employees. This is a skill that can be learned.

Don't be distracted by the tool

Every week, a new AI tool comes out that tempts you to change your workflow because it "changes the game" and now "we're cooked". Stay curious and keep learning, but always remember that your #1 job is to ship, and AI is just a tool to do that faster and better.

As a side effect, work feels more fulfilling

To sum it all up, you need to have a product mindset (know what to build) and take ownership (build the thing from start to finish).

When you can ship features on your own that are also your own ideas, you can say, "I did that." And that makes you feel more creative and less like a machine ticking off a todo list. You can be proud of your work because it's yours.