When I started editing around the pandemic, I remember watching Grammarly flag the same mistakes I was being paid to catch.
I wondered how long anyone would need an editor, and I’d already been mapping out the expenses I’d need to reasonably survive for the foreseeable future.
Then came ChatGPT, followed by other tools that could draft, rewrite, and summarize in seconds. Yet here I am, still reporting. And the tools are still improving.
That uneasy coexistence, between AI and human workers, is becoming familiar in another profession that was not too long ago considered a reliable path to a good paycheck: software engineering.
Companies can increasingly use automated tools to write code, even as young programmers struggle to get a foot in the door. Now, Nvidia (NVDA), the chipmaker powering much of the AI boom, is reportedly considering a bigger investment in or acquisition of Reflection AI, a startup developing software automation technology.
The talks may lead nowhere, and more capable tools don’t automatically mean fewer jobs. But Nvidia’s interest raises a question I recognize from my own desk.
If machines can perform more of the work, how do newcomers learn the skills they’ll need to build a career?
Nvidia explores another deal as software hiring shifts toward experienced workers
Nvidia has already dropped a massive $800 million in Reflection AI, a software-automation startup that was seeking fresh funding at a $25 billion pre-money valuation this spring (a pre-money valuation is an estimate of what a startup is worth prior to outside investment or financing). Now the chipmaker is considering a much bigger move.
More Layoffs:
- Disney cuts 300 jobs and major overhaul puts hundreds more at risk
- Microsoft cuts hundreds more jobs as restructuring deepens
- Oracle layoffs top 2,500 workers as AI spending surges
The Financial Times reported on October 10 that Nvidia is in early talks to acquire Reflection or deepen its investment. Moreover, Reuters said another option involves hiring key employees and licensing the startup’s technology without buying the whole company.
Founded in 2024 by former Google DeepMind researchers, Reflection develops tools to automate software development tasks. Its new Beam model targets coding and AI agents, while its open-weight approach lets businesses customize the underlying technology.
The reported talks fit an expanding Nvidia playbook.
In December 2025, Nvidia acquired SchedMD, whose software manages computing workloads. Later that month, Nvidia licensed Groq’s inference technology and recruited key executives.
On September 2, Nvidia signed an agreement to acquire model-sharing platform Hugging Face for roughly $12.9 billion in purchase and employee-retention consideration, according to Nvidia’s SEC filing. That deal has not yet closed.
I see a common thread where Nvidia is positioning itself to influence the software tools built on top of its chips, not just the hardware market.
For workers, the new AI move comes at an interesting time.
Indeed Hiring Lab reported July 8 that U.S. software-development postings had risen nearly 15% since February 2025. But senior positions accounted for 71% of the increase between May 2025 and May 2026, while software postings remained 27.5% below pre-pandemic levels.
Companies still need programmers. What they’re hiring them to do and why they’re restructuring teams are becoming the bigger questions.
Win McNamee / Getty Images
Tech companies cut thousands of jobs, but AI isn’t the only explanation
Tech companies announced 165,925 job cuts through September, up 54% from a year earlier, according to outplacement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas, as cited by Fast Company.
Moreover, AI was cited in 120,136 announced job cuts across all U.S. industries this year. But that doesn’t mean machines directly replaced everyone who lost a job.
That said, it’s worth considering the different explanations coming from tech’s biggest names.
Amazon (AMZN) cut fewer than 1,000 corporate positions in October, as reported by Reuters, following a much larger restructuring between October 2025 and January 2026 that eliminated nearly 30,000 jobs.
CEO Andy Jassy previously argued that rapid expansion had created too many management layers. The layoffs, he said, weren’t primarily AI-driven, a point founder Jeff Bezos largely agreed with, attributing the cuts to pandemic-era overhiring in an interview I covered.
Microsoft (MSFT) eliminated about 4,800 roles in July, saying the jobs wouldn’t be replaced by AI, as reported by Reuters. Oracle’s (ORCL) workforce shrank by roughly 21,000 over its fiscal year, with its filing acknowledging AI adoption as one of the factors behind the restructuring, as reported by Reuters.
Salesforce (CRM) offers a more direct example. CEO Marc Benioff said automation helped reduce its customer-support headcount from 9,000 to about 5,000, although the company has also described redeploying workers to other roles as reported by the LA Times.
So basically, companies can cut jobs to simplify operations, save money, or automate work, and the reasons can overlap.
Stanford researchers found that employment among 22- to 25-year-olds in highly AI-exposed occupations was 19% below the level implied by trends among less-exposed peers. They cautioned that this wasn’t proof that AI caused the gap.
Meanwhile, Yale’s September analysis found no clear economy-wide disruption in AI employment.
Whether AI caused the latest layoffs remains unsettled. What is clearer is that employers are changing which skills and experience they value.
Software workers face a new career question as coding tools advance
At this point, software engineers aren’t abandoning automated coding tools, but they aren’t blindly trusting them either.
In Stack Overflow’s 2026 Developer Survey, 66% of respondents said they used AI coding assistants or agents at work. Yet only 7% said they trusted AI output for important work decisions.
That caution helps explain why the software developer profession’s outlook isn’t uniformly bleak. The Bureau of Labor Statistics projects employment for software developers, quality assurance analysts, and testers to grow 10% from 2025 to 2035, with about 106,100 openings annually.
The harder question is who gets those opportunities.
Stanford researchers found that younger workers in highly AI-exposed professions were falling behind their less-exposed peers, primarily because of weaker hiring.
And a Google-backed experiment involving 133 patent lawyers found that AI improved assisted work, but lasting gains in independent judgment were concentrated among senior professionals, not juniors.
Lawyers aren’t programmers, but the training dilemma is relevant.
Nvidia’s possible expansion into Reflection AI could help companies build more software and create new jobs. It could also make employers less inclined to hire beginners for routine coding tasks.
So the question raised by automation isn’t whether developers will disappear. It’s whether employers will keep hiring and training the next generation. Watch entry-level openings, not just technology-company layoff totals.
Related: Jeff Bezos makes surprising prediction for workers as Amazon cuts jobs
