Does AI destroy engineering jobs? The data says the opposite. In this episode, Jorge and Antonio dismantle the fear with 19th-century economics and cap it off with a personalized-medicine story that sounds like science fiction.
Jevons’ paradox and the new product engineer
Against the initial panic, demand for software engineers is at all-time highs. The explanation is Jevons’ paradox: when a technology makes a resource cheaper — in this case, producing software — its total consumption skyrockets. There is more software to build than ever; what changes is where the value is. It’s no longer “cranking out code” but systems design and product engineering. So much so that designers themselves are jumping into programming to deliver complete solutions.
Cloudflare vs. WordPress
A busy week in the CMS world: Cloudflare launched its content manager, presenting it as the spiritual successor to WordPress, complete with a tense response from Matt Mullenweg. Beyond the controversy, the relevant fact is the speed: tiny teams, thanks to AI, replicate in months architectures that took decades. Along the same lines, a Python port of Claude Code hit 50,000 GitHub stars in record time after a leak — code travels faster than ever, with or without permission.
The end of the token open bar
“Unlimited” AI subscriptions are limiting their usage, and the episode explains why: companies subsidized consumption to win users, and the party is ending. It also breaks down the price difference between closed and open-source models, with an important nuance: the API cost doesn’t only pay for electricity — it funds elite engineers and the development of the next generation of models.
A personalized vaccine with ChatGPT and AlphaFold
The most astonishing story of the episode comes from Sydney: a man used ChatGPT and AlphaFold to design a personalized messenger-RNA vaccine and save his dog from terminal cancer. Beyond the anecdote, the milestone shows that AI is democratizing top-tier scientific research: what used to require a pharmaceutical lab is now starting to be within reach of a determined person.
Longevity and escape velocity
The closing looks far ahead: manufacturing drugs in zero gravity, the possibility of reversing degenerative diseases in the next decade, and the concept of aging escape velocity — the point at which medicine adds more than a year of life for every year that passes. It sounds like the future, but the pieces are already on the table.
If you take just one idea away: cheap software doesn’t kill the engineer — it multiplies them. See you next week on Tokenizados.