Microsoft just laid off 6,000 employees, including hundreds of software engineers and their Director of Artificial Intelligence. Microsoft also recently announced it will be investing further into AI development, which to me does not translate into an investment in humans.

This got me thinking.

Last week, I mentored a hackathon in Atlanta. A hackathon is a fast-paced software development event where individuals and teams participate to build a web or mobile app to win a prize. Our company, among others, offered our API and data for use by the participants to build a web app based on music business use cases.

There were over 20 participants. Most of them were seasoned software developers, but a few had little to no experience.

Many of the participants engaged in vibe coding, which is a process by which AI writes the code, for the web app they submitted to be judged. They gave the AI prompts related to the use case that they were solutioning and the AI wrote the code.

There were three winners. The 2nd place winner were two individuals who are not software developers at all and cannot write code — a music business educator/lawyer and a product designer. They used AI to design a prototype based on the lawyer’s prompts surrounding sample licensing analysis.

The room was full of software developers, but many of them used AI to write most of the code to build their web apps. Effectively, AI built the apps.

Microsoft is laying off software developers to invest more into AI itself developing AI software to further improve AI development of AI software.

Are the people who are creating AI replacing themselves…with AI?