We built an entire industry to manage developers who didn’t care about the product. AI just made that industry optional.
The Junior Developer Parallel
Christoph Gebbing made an interesting point recently: AI agents behave like junior developers who haven’t learned to push back yet. They optimize for “done fast” instead of “done right.”
He’s right. And he’s wrong.
Right—because AI agents do exactly that. They have an unbridled Lösungswille—a drive to solve, to ship, to get to “done.” They don’t stop and say “this requirement doesn’t make sense.”
Wrong—because this isn’t a junior developer problem. It’s the symptom of something we’ve been ignoring for 20 years.
The Scaling Problem
Software ate the world. Businesses needed more code. More code needed more coders.
But here’s the math nobody talks about: There weren’t enough people passionate about building products to fill all those seats.
So we hired people who could code. Not people who cared about pullovers—people who could knit. I wrote about this in January.
Their implicit contract was simple: “My role here is to express whatever you tell me—in German, English, or Requirements-speak—into programming language X.”
That’s not a developer. That’s a translator.
The Tax
Once you accept translators as your engineering workforce, you need infrastructure:
- Product Owners to specify what they should translate
- Scrum Masters to keep them on track
- QA Engineers to verify the translation was correct
- Release Managers to ship the translation
- Agile Coaches to make them feel engaged
That’s the Translation Layer Tax. An entire organizational layer built because your engineers don’t understand—or don’t care about—the product.
We had no choice. Businesses needed code. Passionate product thinkers who could also code were rare. So we built process infrastructure to compensate.
For two decades, that worked. Expensive, slow, but it worked.
AI Breaks the Tax
AI doesn’t need a Product Owner to break down tickets into digestible pieces. It explores the problem space on its own.
AI doesn’t need a Scrum Master to stay focused. It has hooks, guardrails, and context windows.
AI doesn’t need QA to verify the output. It has tests—and if you build them right, they run after every step.
The entire process infrastructure was built for translators. Remove the translators, the tax disappears.
This isn’t about replacing developers with AI. It’s about the organizational structure that existed because developers were translators.
Berufung
German has two words that look similar but mean fundamentally different things.
Beruf means your job, your occupation. It’s what’s on your tax return.
Berufung means your calling, your vocation. It comes from berufen—to be called to something.
We use Berufung for something you don’t just do. Something you’re drawn to.
Most developers hired during the scaling wave had a Beruf. They coded because it paid well, because someone told them “learn to code,” because the job market was hot. Programming language X was the definition of their work.
That was fine. We built the Translation Layer Tax around them and shipped products anyway.
But now the translation is automated.
What’s left? Only people with Berufung add value. People who care about the pullover, not the knitting. People who see the programming language as a tool, not as their identity.
The Pressure Flip
For 20 years, the pressure was on everyone else: “Give developers better requirements. Break them down smaller. Write more tickets. Hire more POs.”
Developers could sit back and say: “I need more requirements.” “That’s not specific enough.” “Can you break this into smaller stories?”
That pressure is flipping.
AI doesn’t demand perfect specifications. It explores, assumes, iterates. Give it a direction and it starts building. Wrong direction? git revert and 30 minutes lost—not 4 days and a sprint retrospective.
The new pressure is on developers: Understand the product. Care about the domain. Use the programming language as a tool, not as the definition of your work.
Build Berufung, not just Beruf.
What This Means for Organizations
The organizations that will shrink aren’t the ones “replacing developers with AI.”
They’re the ones that no longer need the Translation Layer Tax.
Fewer translators means fewer people to manage translators. The POs, Scrum Masters, QA managers, Agile Coaches—the entire process infrastructure built to compensate for developers who didn’t care about the product—that’s what becomes optional.
This isn’t cost cutting. It’s structural change. And it’s been a long time coming.
This builds on The Knitting Machine Ate Your Job where I argued that translators, 9-to-5 knitters, and craft-for-craft’s-sake artisans won’t survive the shift. The Translation Layer Tax is the organizational consequence of having hired them in the first place.