This is just an admission you don't know where work comes from. Like you think there's a fixed size of pie of work.

If the company has a legal monopoly that prevents competition, sure. Otherwise, unless they're dumb and want to risk the other two leaving, they'll task all 4 of them to use the AI to accomplish things that were infeasible or uneconomical before, to try win market share or increase margins.

You are assuming human resources are hired based on budget only instead of need. Your assumption is: "we have 400,000$ to spend on something. Oh okay let's spend them on hiring 4 engineers at 100k each" and with AI they just happen to be as efficient as 8 engineers. Yay. They'll just do more things.

This might be the case at startups.

For mid to larger size companies very often it is though: "we have X amount of work/projects/maintenance/support to do. How many people do we need and how much do we need to budget for that? Oh we need about 4? Will 400,000$ do? Okay let's go". In this case yes. If a $200/month AI subscription can bring those 4 people down to 3 or even 2 of course the company will lay off.

How do you square your comment with the fact that companies routinely engage in mass layoffs when they are profitable already?

> How do you square your comment with the fact that companies routinely engage in mass layoffs when they are profitable already?

Not op, but…

Just because a company is profitable doesn’t mean that they make good decisions around hiring.