What If We've Been Completely Wrong About AI's Real Danger?

This week, I watched Adam Wathan announce he was laying off 75% of his team. Adam created Tailwind — a framework I use almost every day. And reading his message, I felt something strange. Not surprise. Recognition.

Because what he's describing, I'm living it too. On a smaller scale, sure. But I've spent 25 years writing code, creating open source packages, sharing knowledge freely. And for the first time, I'm wondering if the rules of the game just changed — and nobody sent us the memo.

We've been asking the wrong question

For two years now, every conference, every LinkedIn post, every dinner conversation comes back to the same debate: "Will AI replace developers?" We argue, we reassure each other, we quote studies. Senior devs will be fine. Juniors need to adapt. Blah blah blah.

But while we were busy debating that question, something else was happening. Something nobody saw coming.

AI isn't replacing developers. It's killing everything around them.

Adam's confession hit me hard

In his podcast — titled, quite simply, "We Had Six Months Left" — Wathan explains that traffic to Tailwind's documentation dropped 40% since early 2023. Not because fewer people use Tailwind. The opposite: it's never been more popular. 75 million downloads a month.

But here's the thing: nobody visits the docs anymore.

Why would they? When I need a Tailwind component, I ask Claude. When a junior on my team gets stuck on flexbox, they ask Cursor. The AI generates perfect code in seconds — trained, ironically, on that very documentation nobody visits anymore.

And without visitors, there's no discovery. No discovery means no sales of Tailwind UI. No sales means no revenue to pay engineers. In six months, they wouldn't have been able to make payroll.

Let that sink in. The most popular CSS framework in the world. Nearly bankrupt. Not despite its success — because of it.

I recognize this story

I've created over 20 Laravel packages. Nothing compared to Tailwind, obviously. But the model is the same: you build something useful, you share it freely, you write documentation, you hope some of that goodwill converts into visibility, clients, opportunities.

For years, this worked. People would Google a problem, land on my GitHub, explore my other projects, sometimes reach out for consulting. The open source economy of attention.

But lately? My download numbers keep climbing. My docs traffic? Flat or declining. People use my code without ever knowing I exist. The AI extracted the value and delivered it directly — no middleman required.

I'm not complaining. It's not about me. It's about understanding what's actually happening.

The real victims aren't who you think

We keep talking about developers losing their jobs to AI. But look at who's actually bleeding:

Chegg — the homework help platform — lost 99% of its market value. Not 9%. Ninety-nine. Students figured out ChatGPT answers the same questions for free.

Stack Overflow — the place where every developer has copy-pasted code at least once — saw its question volume drop 75%. They're now selling their data to OpenAI. The snake eating its own tail.

Udemy, Coursera — rushing into a $2.5 billion merger because they see the wall coming. When AI can explain any concept instantly, who pays $199 for a video course?

These aren't developers. They're the intermediaries. The explainers. The documentation writers. The tutorial creators. The knowledge middlemen.

And here's the uncomfortable truth

We — the open source community, the bloggers, the Stack Overflow answerers, the documentation writers — we built the training data. Every helpful answer, every well-documented function, every tutorial we wrote for free... it all got scraped, processed, and embedded into models that now make us obsolete.

The AI didn't steal our jobs. It's stealing our audience. And without an audience, the economic model collapses.

I think about the mass of knowledge that exists because developers were generous. Because we answered questions at 11pm for imaginary internet points. Because we believed in sharing.

What happens when there's no incentive left to share?

Google just became Tailwind's sponsor

Twenty-four hours after the layoffs went public, Google AI announced they were sponsoring the project. A nice gesture. Also, perhaps, a quiet admission of responsibility.

The companies profiting most from open source — Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, Microsoft — are the ones accelerating its depletion. They trained on our collective generosity. Now they're watching the sources dry up.

Someone on Hacker News asked the question that keeps me up at night: "Where will ChatGPT go for training data when Stack Overflow has disappeared?"

I don't know. I don't think anyone does.

So what do we do?

I don't have answers. I'm 53 years old, I've been coding since I was a teenager, and for the first time, I genuinely don't know what comes next.

But I know this: we were asking the wrong question. "Will AI replace developers?" was always a distraction. The real question is: who funds the knowledge infrastructure that AI feeds on?

We built an economy on attention and goodwill. AI just proved that economy was more fragile than any of us imagined.

Maybe it's time to rethink how value flows in this ecosystem. Maybe the companies extracting billions from open source need to give back more than GitHub stars and thank-you tweets. Maybe we need new models entirely.

Or maybe — and this is what scares me — maybe we'll just watch it all slowly crumble, one Tailwind at a time, while still debating whether AI will take our jobs.

The canary in the coal mine isn't coughing anymore.

It stopped singing.

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I've been a developer for 25 years, CTO, now Chapter Lead at a major European bank. I maintain open source packages and watch this world change faster than I can process. These are my thoughts, unfiltered. I'd love to hear yours.