> If AI removes one of my co-workers, our competitors will keep the co-worker and out-compete us.

This assumes that the companies' business growth is a function of the amount of code written, but that would not make much sense for a software company.

Many companies (including mine) are building our product with an engineering team 1/4 the size of what would have been required a few years ago. The whole idea is that we can build the machine to scale our business with far fewer workers.

How many companies have you worked at in the past where the backlog dried up and the engineering team sat around doing nothing?

Even in companies that are no longer growing I've always seen the roadmap only ever get larger (at that point you get desperate to try to catch back up, or expand into new markets, while also laying people off to cut costs).

Will we finally out-write the backlog of ideas to try and of feature requests? Or will the market get more fragmented as more smaller competitors can carve out different niches in different markets, each with more-complex offerings than they could've offered 5 years ago?