Once upon a time, in a large software company called CodeCorp, a team of five senior developers earned six-figure salaries. They spent their days in endless meetings, reviewing code they no longer wrote themselves, and drinking expensive coffee while staring at screens.
One Monday morning, the CEO walked excitedly into the conference room.
“Guys, I have incredible news. We’ve just integrated ‘Aether,’ an AI that writes perfect code in seconds. It can do in one hour what used to take weeks. We’re going to revolutionize productivity!”
The developers looked at each other. They weren’t smiling.
The next day, Aether was fully integrated. The first sprint was completed in two days instead of three weeks. The clients were thrilled. The CEO called a celebration meeting.
“With this, we can reduce costs and offer more competitive prices. Some of you will move to AI supervision roles. Naturally, we’ll adjust salaries according to the new workload.”
An uncomfortable silence fell.
That same night, the five developers met in a dark bar downtown.
“We’re not going to allow this,” said Marcos, the technical lead, while stirring his whiskey. “I’ve been earning 180k a year for fifteen years just for ‘thinking about architecture.’ If the AI does the heavy lifting, why the hell should I accept less?”
“Exactly,” added Laura, the frontend specialist. “I didn’t train for years to become a mediocre ‘prompt engineer.’ If they want the AI to do everything, they should pay the same salary for supervising it.”
They devised a silent but effective plan: sabotage the AI’s productivity without anyone noticing.
They began introducing “improvements” to the prompts. They added absurd requirements, demanded unnecessary manual reviews, and created subtle bugs that only they knew how to fix. Every time Aether delivered perfect code, one of them would say:
“This is fine, but it doesn’t follow our 2024 internal standards. It needs to be rewritten.”
The CEO saw the reports: the AI was “reducing” time, but personnel costs remained exactly the same. Deadlines mysteriously stretched. Real productivity actually dropped.
Three months passed. The company kept billing the same amounts, but the developers continued earning the same… or even more, because they now demanded “bonuses for AI governance expertise.”
One day, the CEO stormed into the room furious:
“The AI is taking longer than before! What’s going on?”
Marcos shrugged with an innocent face.
“These AIs are very good, but they need high-level human supervision. We can’t lower the salaries—that would be irresponsible. Quality would suffer.”
The CEO sighed, defeated.
“Fine… keep the salaries. But at least try to make the AI do something.”
The five developers left the meeting smiling.
That night, in the same bar, they raised their glasses.
“To the AI that does the work,” said Laura, lifting her drink, “and to the humans who will never lower their rates.”
And so, at CodeCorp, artificial intelligence kept advancing… but the developers’ salaries remained untouchable.
The End.
