The artificial intelligence revolution is shaking up the world of development and raising fears of layoffs

While the US and Israel are attacking Iran in order to allow the Iranian people to overthrow the Ayatollah regime, the world of innovation continues to struggle to find its place within the revolution it itself unleashed on the world – the artificial intelligence revolution. An industry that prided itself for decades in writing the rules of the game, is now discovering with growing anxiety that the rules are no longer its own – and that the new player does not bother to ask for permission before sitting down at the table.

Software companies have already begun to pay the price of AI progress, wiping out about 2 trillion in aggregate value from stock exchanges over the past year through last February. The steepest drop in value was experienced when Anthropic launched artificial intelligence agents and collapsed the value of software companies by a total of $300 billion in one week. The damage did not escape Blue-White companies either. In addition to the damage to the traded companies, private companies were also affected, which built on an initial public offering (IPO) in order to raise funds to continue their activities.

It’s hard to stay updated

Data from the Layoffs.fyi website show that in 2024, approximately 152,922 technology workers were laid off worldwide from 551 companies, and a report by RationalFX shows that in 2025, approximately 244,000 additional workers have already been laid off, with approximately 70,000 of these layoffs being directly attributed to the adoption of AI and automation. In the first six weeks of 2026, approximately 30,700 layoffs have already been recorded – a number that sets the rate of layoffs this year as a rate that will even overtake the 2025 figures.

Israel also experienced for the first time in a decade a decrease in the number of people employed in high-tech, with the workforce shrinking by about 2% from about 417 thousand workers at the end of 2024 to about 409 thousand at the end of 2025. The number of job seekers in the Israeli technology industry stood at about 16.3 thousand in December 2025 – twice as many as in December 2022.

Of those job seekers, about 59% come from the software professions, with programmers and systems analysts making up about 51% of all high-tech job seekers, and their rate is on the rise. The number of jobs in research and development in Israel also recorded a decrease of about 6.5% in the first half of 2025 compared to the corresponding period in 2024.

This insight did not come as a result of the advancement of AI, but from the understanding that “most high-tech workers do not reach retirement age at their workplace – and this was before AI. Technology advances very quickly and it is difficult for everyone to stay up-to-date, so it was clear that the day would come when I would have to find another job. The fog about the economic future led me to prepare in advance by purchasing assets and accumulating savings. I am not ready for retirement and do not want to retire, but I have prepared a basis for myself for the day when It will come.”

A plumber and a locksmith

A Stanford University study published in August 2025 under the name Canaries in the Coal Mine analyzed salary data of millions of American workers through the ADP system, a US payroll management software company, and found that the employment of software developers aged 22-25 dropped by almost 20% compared to the peak recorded at the end of 2022.

Another study by Indeed through Federal Reserve Economic Data reinforces the picture and shows a decrease of about 60% in job ads for entry-level jobs between 2022 and 2024. The unemployment rate among computer science graduates in the US was 6.1% in 2025, while software engineers face 7.5% unemployment – one of the highest rates among all technological academic degrees.

In the startup companies, it is evident that the situation is even worse: companies in the SEED stage had 21% fewer employees compared to the first half of 2020. This is according to the Carta report for the first half of 2025, which states that “these founders are leveraging AI to achieve much more with small teams than was previously possible”.

Although artificial intelligence is taking a bite out of some of the technological activity that humans did in the past, it is still too early to eulogize the professionals, including the programmers. The same study by Anthropic, which examined the impact of AI on the labor market, also found that the gap between the theoretical potential of artificial intelligence and the actual application is still large. In the field of computing and mathematics, for example, it was found that the AI ​​can theoretically cover 94% of the tasks of a professional in the field, but in practice only covers about 33% of them. In the managerial and office professions, it can theoretically cover about 90%, but in practice only covers 25%. In the fields of business and finance, the rate of tasks that artificial intelligence can theoretically perform is about 85%, while in practice it is used to perform only 20% of the tasks.

The gap is explained in the research as arising from practical barriers such as software integration requirements, legal constraints, the need for human testing and slower organizational adoption cycles. The requirements even expand with the progress of AI and require the recruitment of additional personnel.

Statistics from the US Department of Labor predict a 15-18 percent growth in software development professions in the coming decade, and employment data from 2025 showed an increase in demand for development roles – but ones that are unique to AI. For example, AI Engineer positions increased by 143.2% during the year 2025, Prompt Engineer positions increased by 135.8% during the same period, and all mentions of AI in job ads jumped by approximately 56.1% in the same year, after increasing by 114.8% during the year 2023 and 120.6% during the year 2024 – which indicates that the niche has become a central requirement.

Elidan adds: “My grandmother, for example, was a programmer at the Technion decades ago. She wrote code on cards, a kind of diskettes. When I studied at the Hebrew University, the studies were already based on a different technology. Does that mean I can’t do what my grandmother did? Of course I can. Before history exams, we sat with an encyclopedia and lesson summaries. But today there are search engines such as Google and GPT chat. So yes, they have changed parts of the teaching profession And the nature and manner of learning. Has the teaching disappeared? Certainly not – but it has changed.”

According to him, “so the human is still required. In the technology aspect, he is required, among other things, to build the base, monitor and control the AI. We have not yet reached the stage where the artificial intelligence can fully imitate a human, including thought, and it is not known if this is possible. As technology develops, the key’s job becomes more of a type of team manager.”

Elidan continues and says: “Will it be more difficult to be good in this profession? It may be. Will there come a time when a salesperson will write a feature live an hour before a sales meeting? It may be. At Milestone, we produce an industry benchmark that examines what is normal work with AI and what is not normal, and a company that wants to maintain its competitive advantage must run with the technology forward. It has no choice. In other words: produce an air conditioning preparation for the next technology, and not be silent about The yeast”.

A matter of emotion

Indeed, in the middle of last December, Echo completed raising approximately 35 million dollars in round A and continues to recruit employees. Doron: “I manage 20 developers and researchers and today we are working to double the number, while the number of employees remains open going forward in light of the increasing rate of development. It is true that a team of ten experienced developers who know how to work effectively with AI tools can today produce output that previously required up to 40 programmers, and sometimes even more, depending on the type of technology. But AI has given us an opportunity to take on more challenges and products and create competition in the market, and in This actually brought up, at least for us, the need to recruit manpower.”

What has changed anyway? Doron says that “artificial intelligence has changed the profile of the programmers I’m looking for. The ‘new programmer’, who by the way can be found at all ages, in my opinion, needs to have mental flexibility and the ability to adapt to rapid changes. This is something we check. At the end of the day, we are an AI company, and artificial intelligence is a large part of our product. In the field of cyber, it is very noticeable that those who cannot run fast – simply do not exist. A competitive advantage is really a necessary condition for success in the field, and therefore recruiting programmers with Mental flexibility and the ability to quickly adapt to changes are necessary for a company that wants to create an advantage in the cyber field. So, in my opinion, the profession is not dead, but the way of measuring the profession has decreased, but it is more difficult to specialize in it today, when the ‘artistic’ and creative side, in which the programmer produces something from nothing, has become more dramatic.

Elidan wants to illustrate: “Can you tell AI to make a video and it will do it? Yes. But will the artificial intelligence know how to put the required emotion into the video? Not sure. That requires human touch. Until we reach the day when there is artificial intelligence that matches human cognitive abilities (Artificial general intelligence – AGI), we will all be in the pursuit of being more efficient as humans – alongside the artificial intelligence. And as long as we are in this pursuit, the jobs of the programmers They will not disappear, but will change. It may be that three years from now a programmer will also have to be a designer. This change, by the way, is already happening and you can feel it.”

Doron: “It is already evident that a wider public of programmers succeeds in doing the basic programming tasks. But the programmers who want to remain relevant will be measured, and are already measured today, according to their ability to take the knowledge and experience they have gained and significantly enhance it by using AI. It should be noted that the transformation of the profession is still in progress and is not over.”

Not a threat – an opportunity

The programming profession is indeed shrouded in the fog of uncertainty, but for now the data points to a clear and consistent picture: it has not disappeared, but is undergoing a deep structural metamorphosis. Traditional programming roles such as writing routine code, fixing simple bugs, creating code in Weilerplate and more are indeed shrinking, especially at the entry level. The 27.5% decrease in the employment of “Computer Programmers” in the USA in the years 2023-2025 is tangible evidence of this.

But at the same time, new roles are developing, which require a combination of advanced technical skills with human abilities: system architecture, user experience design, understanding business needs and managing hybrid teams of humans and artificial intelligence. The fact that AI Engineer positions grew by 143% with an annual salary of approximately $206,000 demonstrates the new demand.

It is evident that the future of the profession, according to the industry, is not as “programmers facing AI” but as “programmers with AI” – professionals who know how to leverage artificial intelligence as a tool, while focusing on solving complex problems that require human judgment, creativity and business understanding. Their number, as the industry estimates, will actually increase, when the challenges of the profession are clear: a change in the training structure and a change in the way and nature of the work.

For those who will manage to adapt, the picture that emerges is far from bleak: the demand for skilled technological experts remains strong, the salary in the new AI professions is significantly higher than the salary in traditional programming professions, and the World Economic Forum estimates that although about 85 million jobs may disappear by 2030 as a result of AI, about 97 million new jobs will be created.

The question, then, is no longer whether programmers will become redundant, but what types of programmers will thrive in the new era.