I asked an AI to do my job and it did. Cool, cool.

I am a software engineer. I have been using LLMs since the beginning, with the same healthy skepticism everyone had and, let's be honest, most people still have. Every new model would come out, everyone would lose their minds, and I would poke at it for a week and think "yeah, impressive, but not quite there". Rinse and repeat.

Claude Opus 4.6 was the first model that made me genuinely think: oh no, this might actually replace me. Not in a "tech bro hype" way. In a "I just asked it to do my job and it did it" way.

You have probably seen the headlines. Company lays off X amount of people. Blames AI. Stock goes up. The truth is, a lot of those layoffs are companies mishandling their finances and using AI as a convenient excuse to keep investors happy. Easier to say "we are investing in the future" than "we spent too much money".

But some of it is real. And that is what keeps me up at night.

Let's say it actually happens. Most companies make a lot of people redundant over the next ten years. What then?

Governments would need to support all these people. But where does that money come from? Taxes. And who pays taxes? People with jobs. You see the problem.

Our whole economic system runs on people buying things. You buy a coffee, the coffee shop pays rent, the landlord pays their mortgage, the bank lends more money, everyone stays happy. Take a big chunk of people out of that loop and the whole thing starts to look a bit shaky.

The optimistic take is that new jobs will appear, like they always have. The pessimistic take is that this time the technology is eating the new jobs too, before they even get a chance to exist.

And then there is the personal side of it. I am an overthinker. It is not a superpower, it is just annoying. And this stuff does not help.

My girlfriend and I are thinking about buying a flat. Starting a family. Normal life things that people do. But how do you make a 25 year financial commitment when you genuinely do not know if your job will exist in five years? How do you plan anything when the ground keeps moving?

I know I am not alone in this. A lot of people have this sitting somewhere in the back of their head. They do not talk about it much because it sounds dramatic. But it is there. Quietly making every big decision feel a little harder than it should be.

Most people end up doing what humans have always done when faced with something too big to solve: they push it aside and get on with their lives. Buy the flat. Have the kid. Hope for the best. Which is probably the right call. Worrying about it does not change anything.

But I cannot fully shake it. And I suspect a few of you reading this cannot either.

I do not have an answer. Nobody does. But I think we should probably start talking about it before Claude 5 writes this article better than I just did.

Which, honestly, it probably already could.