I am struggling as a software developer in this economy

How does a consult feels now

Software consulting companies are most common and job giving in my country, compared to Big tech where millions fight for 10 job openings.

Before the AI era, software developers in these consults used to make money, like good amount of money with their day job, learning new tech every day and moving forward to this top paying salaries.

Now everything is platued. The ceiling has hit. if someone knows basic programming and english they can use AI to code anything from scratch.

but most people hate AI now, completely avoid it. because AI generated code is unpredictable, introduces bugs, leads security issues.

But those issues were not a big problem in these consults in the first place, if there is a bug then its not the end of the world. they are not going to loss a million dollars like instagram or youtube, instead the developers will wake up the next morning and fix the bug and deploy. Not much financial loss.

What about security ?

Every single consult i know use old frameworks, has this c panel, most of them doesn't even consider using cloudflare or firewalls on the server.

Take any website these consults has build, get the ip address and run a port scan with nmap. and there will be 10 different ports that are open. lose proxy configuration, APIs are not even rate limited, Auth Tokens are stored on localStorage instead of http only cookie... and there is more..

Now there are no good developers who can handle all these or atleast know these things exist, or intrested in fixing these issues in the first place, because there is always a new deadline waiting. So the company/developers doesn't even care about code-quality, security, or reliability.

Now AI does this same thing, the code it generated is subpar, security might be an issue, and the feature reliability varies.

So AI is a gift for consults.

The issues or features that used to take months now can be implemented in few days.

most of these companies will have a product in there hand and they whitelabel it for various clients, that part can be fully automated as well.

Now the UI / frontend part.

Most consults does not care about the UI as they care about functionality so the UI of the applications will be subpar as well. But with AI, yes there is no need of frontend developers. But you might argue that some websites are complex, the animations, etc .. but does all the consults we have right now build those complex front end websites ?

So this is the best time to transition from Frontend to Fullstack because that alone will become obsolute in the next few years. There wont be any frontend hires.

Wordpress ( people say this is used in 70% of the total websites currently we have on the internet ) will die soon, Why ? We didn't used a react framework because it has hard, building the cms, building a feature like a carousel could take hours to build with react, so people relied on wordpress because everything can be installed as plugins.

Now with AI , anyone can build a high performant nextjs application, including a cms backend.

Downfall of Freelance Developers

As these tools become easier and easier, the work offloading from countries like US will stop. No one will hire from fiver or upwork anymore.

Want a website ? why not use the hostinger AI builder for that ? or v0 from vercel. Just drag and drop your company profile and your website is ready.

Most of the clients does not want an SEO friendly website or high performant, good looking site. They want an old school information filled website that 50yrs olds search for. So those smaller jobs like building a static website is gone.

Impact

I am not building fomo. But my research provided solid facts these are the two.

1. Google play 14 Tester update Now that everyone is spamming these stores with AI Apps, google play introduced a 14days 12 tester rule , you and your 11 peers have to test your own app on closed track before you can upload to production / submit for a review.( i am sure apple will also do something similar in the near future )

2. Codecanyon/Envanto Author intake is paused now. These software market places where gems for those who where building a new app, templates where cheap so they could get one and ship there app like that, but these companies noticed the spam of AI templates/apps and they do not allow anyone anymore to become an Author. the documentation says it will be opening on mid April 2026 but they limit the access to video contents/ graphics rather than software products.

These where solid side income businesses for most developers i know and everything is doomed.

What other fields will be affected ?

People will utilize more and more AI videos/music and the movie,music industry will be affected. There will be copy cat music of the popular one and it will for sure become viral. Youtube will enforce restrictions later..

How to survive in this economy ?

Build strong fundamentals, become a senior developer who can actually read AI generated code, and debug it.

These buzz words are easy to say ? when you are a beginner or an average developer in a specific language, you cannot even understand a well written modern opensource codebase, how will you be able to read and debug AI written code ?

So the first thing is become super good at a language, lets say javascript/typescript. Then you can easily review code like a senior developer

Read blogs, explore alternatives, if you are a frontend developer this is high time to become a backend developer but make sure you are using the same language for both, like react js developer should try nodejs with express, then building apps with it. learning CI/CD pipelines, There are common folder architectures for projects, monorepo , microservices these things help. Learn about docker. you dont need to write alot of configurations for docker , but be good with volumes, containers , taking backup of those, know where the db is stored , what happens when the volume is removed ? ask these questions and explore.

Rat race

Data structures and algorithms should be considered, this is a standard set by most big tech so if you want to exit from the consult rat race learn these.

Charging clients now.

Charging clients has changed, almost everyone knows AI exists, the client will create a document and pass down to you. you will be asked to build it end to end. if you are smart you will simply attach that file into the llm and bang. the feature / app is ready.

Now back in the day we used to tell the client that this feature will take X amount of time and it will cost Y. but since the client know that we can use AI to speed it up, the might not be willing to pay for the same. or they wont pay for it at all.

But what about the Bugs that LLM introduced while implementing that feature ? who is going to fix it ? the developer. now you spend the Y hours time debugging the issue for no money. because this is your fault right. not the AIs.

So i think freelancing is going to change in a bad way. ofcourse you can handle more clients but they pay will be smaller and smaller.

There might be collage students who would build the same site for 1 dollars, while you charged the client for 100usd.

How to proceed from now on

Make as much as money possible. Everything will platoe at some point The thrill of building something will be lost after sometimes. Improve the communication as much as possible. understand business logic. If you still want to survive, then build strong fundamentals, stick to one leading technology something like react/nextjs or react native , go deeper into it. contribute to the library.. only then you can survive, if you stuck on the high level of building apps and building more and more apps, AI will eat your job.

Spend 3 hours a day coding a day with bare hands. No AI. this will make you survive coding interviews learn DSA, there will be a screening round on every single interviews for this from now on. because previously we used projects to showcase our work to the interviewer, but unless its not hitting real users. it holds no value. anyone can vibe code an application with 100 features these days and deploy it.