Somebody used AI to make a free Photoshop, and the software industry is calling it "the end of software." That's a strange thing to hear from the same industry that's been selling AI as the end of everybody else's job.
Both stories run on the same engine. A company that has to beat last quarter wants two things: fewer people on the payroll, and more money from every customer, every month. AI promises the first. Subscriptions already delivered the second. Now AI is undoing the second, and nobody upstairs seems to have planned for that.
The layoffs are running late
In 2025, Anthropic's CEO said AI could wipe out half of entry-level white-collar jobs within five years. A year and change later, the layoffs still aren't widespread, and the explanation isn't flattering to management. Most companies' AI experiments fail, and a lot of employees are using the thing like a glorified Google. Plenty of bosses have looked at the results and decided it isn't as good as they hoped. For a lot of people, the thing standing between them and a layoff is a manager who can't work the software.
That doesn't make the plan any less of a plan. Strip out the hype and what's left is arithmetic: people cost money every month, and software is supposed to cost less. A company chasing the lowest possible cost will swap one for the other the moment the swap works, and asking nicely won't change that. The jobs aren't safe. They're on back order.
Who trains the seniors
Developers are first in line. Executives are already asking whether a 22-year-old with a computer science degree is worth hiring, while also admitting you can't have a senior engineer without first having a junior one. That's a company planning to need senior engineers in ten years and giving itself no way to make any.
The people still building things on their own aren't doing much better. One indie developer spent 14 years on a dream game. The copy took a weekend. Anybody deciding whether to spend the next decade making something is doing that math now too.
Rent, forever
We used to buy software. You paid once, installed it, and used it until an update offered something worth paying for again. Then the quarterly numbers needed something steadier than a customer who only shows up when there's something new, so the program turned into rent: more than $1,000 a year for Adobe's suite, with cancellation fees in some cases worth half the annual contract. The software never needed us every month. The revenue did.
So when somebody points AI at that suite and walks off with a free copy, it's hard to feel bad for the landlord. What protected Office all these years was the hundred developers it would take to copy it. The same companies now trying to need fewer developers just found out what their moat was made of. Expect them to ask lawmakers for a new one.
The small type
The graduates who can't find a first job and the people watching their work get copied in a weekend didn't set any of this up. They're the ones who pay for it first.
The lowest possible cost was supposed to be a problem for the people on the payroll. It applies to the product too, and the lowest possible cost of Photoshop is now zero. A business built on squeezing its workers and its customers just met a tool that can copy the business. Ctrl+C doesn't check job titles.
