More and more companies are talking openly about how they’re changing their hiring practices with the advent of AI.
Gumroad has said that the company is no longer hiring even senior software engineers because of AI. Just two months ago, Gumroad had said that it had stopped hiring junior and mid-level engineers because their jobs could be done with AI.
“No longer hiring senior or even staff-level software engineers,’ Gumroad CEO and founder Sahil Lavingia posted on X. “If you love building stuff you can contribute to our open source, and if you want to get paid it’s way better to cofound your own thing (and hire AI software engineers yourself) than work for me or anyone else,” he added.
In February this year, Lavingia had said that his company had stopped hiring junior and mid-level developers. “No longer hiring junior or even mid-level software engineers,” he’d then said. “Our tokens per codebase: Gumroad: 2M Flexile: 800K Helper: 500K Iffy: 200K Shortest: 100K. Both Claude 3.5 Sonnet and o3-mini have context windows of 200K tokens, meaning they can now write 100% of our Iffy and Shortest code if prompted well. It won’t be long until AI will be writing all the code for Helper, Flexile, and Gumroad. My guess is by the end of 2026,” he had said.
Lavingia had also laid out how the company had replaced their developers with AI. “Our new process: 1. Sit and chat about what we need to build, doing research with Deep Research as we go. 2. Have AI record everything and turn it into a spec. 3. Clean up the spec, adding any design requirements / other nuances. 4. Have Devin code it up. 5. QA, merge, (auto-)deploy to prod,” he had said.
Gumroad isn’t the only company that’s already replacing human software engineers with AI. Inmobi has said that 80 percent of its code will be automated by the end of the year, which would mean that people would lose jobs. Salesforce and Klarna have also paused their software engineer hiring because of gains they’re seeing from AI. And the extent of automation of coding seems to be only increasing — Google has said that 30 percent of the code at the company is now being written by AI, while Microsoft has given a similar number. Meta has said that in 18 months, it expects that most of the code for its AI agents will be written by AI itself. And with companies going from not hiring junior and mid-level software engineers to not hiring even senior software engineers in just two months, the adoption of AI — especially at smaller companies — seems to be relentless.