It’s 2026 and we’ve had our measured amount of ominous messages voiced by [mostly AI] industry leaders, the big names that, when they speak, CEOs around the world listen and act on it. The message has changed from:

• AI will unleash levels of productivity never seen before
• AI will drastically reduce the workforce around the world
• AI will replace you
• AI will not replace you; people who use AI will

And of course, we can’t miss the niche, mini-omimous statements any time a new niche AI tool (like Google Stitch) hits the market, we get:

• AI will replace designers
• AI will replace developers
• AI will replace all accounting departments
• AI will replace [insert niche career]

But through all this, there’s a specific truth that has kept me at peace: I’ve been in this undustry for a little over 10 years (in 2026). I’ve seen some ups, some downs, and gotten my hands dirty working on the field, gathering requirements, meeting with clients, tackling dependency issues, hunting bugs, refactoring entire enterprise applications, switching monolith APIs to microservices (when they became fancy), switching from microservices to monolith APIs (in those orgs were fancy ended up costing more and being a nightmare to maintain). I’ve designed UIs for mobile, tablets, desktop, native and even some IoT and HMI interfaces, but most importantly, I’ve centered divs, tons of them.

I have embraced AI, indeed, I use it on a daily basis, a few different LLMs for different purposes, and it’s specifically having done all this AND constantly experimenting with ways to make AI work for all my use cases what makes me confidently say:

There’s no way AI is replacing anywone who’s deep into tech and/or design work (just yet).

To me, AI is an accelerator. It can produce valuable outputs if it’s provided with the right context, instructions and contraints (which is all the things that someone knee-deep in his job already does and knows on a daily basis). Good input, good output. Meh input, meh output (but shiny).

No LLM in itself has the capability to replace anyone. It can replace entire pieces of your work, but your job is more than a task. Your job is your training, your secured access, the guy in the server room you can reach out to, the company accountant that helps you polish the requirements to make a feature add value to that part of the business, the way you navigate process ineficiencies, the way you chase managers and stakeholders to get approval on the new design, your sync with the contractor agency running the ad campaigns, the Excel sheet with 8+ million records which keeps the business afloat and no one dares to modify because the person who maintained it changed jobs 3 years ago, and the list just goes on and on.

So where is the risk?

If your only job is doing a piece of the work, and that piece is automated with an AI service, you’re done in that role. But that’s rarely the case (but if that indeed is your case, it can be solved by upgrading your skillset). But again, I’ve worked with countless teams across the world ranging from e-commerce solutions to national defense, and it is rare for someone to really do a single, repetitive thing over and over in an office. We do magic in all sorts of ways to deliver value inside an organization, and if you stop and think about it for long enough, you’ll realize it might be your case too.