I just got back from my 7th, and definite last Year End Party with my company. Seeing so many people saying this will their last YEP with the company filled me with so much thoughts I couldn’t sleep, I had to get up at 5AM to write it down.

So where do we start? I guess we’ll take a quick look back at 2024.

2024 was a…pedicular year, for lack of a better word. There was so many new things to learn, and yet far fewer things to do.

The year began with the menace of AI looming over the horizon. The biggest fear among other things, was loss of employment opportunities. Which newer, more capable models popping up ever other day, people was rightly afraid of losing their jobs. Then some random idiot said something along the lines of: ”AI will not replace you, a person using AI will” And things calmed down for a while, gullible people took refuge in that statement, and I admit one of them was me.

I am what you can describe as a person using AI. I was among the first people jumping on this bandwagon and learned everything I can (*see a list of stuffs I managed to learn/explore in 2024 below) And yet that didn’t help me one bit, I just received words that my company could no longer afford to extend my contract past 2025 (fancy words for being laid off, I know) I’ve seen this coming for a while and already in the process of securing positions in other companies, but this is not just about me.

Waves and waves of layoffs happening across the tech world. Salesforce announcing it will not be hiring any more software engineer in 2025 after sacking their entire sales and customer support department.

It is very clear that jobs are not being replaced, they are actively disappearing. AI is already replacing people, even people who know how to use AI, there’s only so many seats remaining for the rest of us (There’s a quote in Vietnamese: “Ghế thì ít, mà đít thì nhiều” – roughly translates to “So little seats for so many asses” except it rhymes of course)

At the YEP I mentioned, I met so many people who also mention this will also be their last YEP with the company. It made me realize that it’s not just us employees getting affected, the company, no, the entire outsourcing industry is in deep trouble. In 2025, if you don’t have your own product, you don’t own an original idea, there’s nowhere to go from there. Even if you do have an original product you only have a slim chance of making it.

Random list of things I explored/learned in 2024 in no particular order:

• Image generation/manipulation Tools: Midjourney, Stable Diffusion (via Automatic1111 and eventually reluctantly moved to the node-based ComfyUI). Remember the day when we first had a sneak peak at text-to-image capabilities of DALL-E and it blown our collective mind? That feels like a decade ago but it was in fact just over 3 years ago. People barely even talk about DALL-E anymore these days, it’s amazing and scary how fast things moved in this space
• Extensive interaction with LLMs, both online (ChatGPT, Claude, Groq, Gemini, Deepseek) and local (Llama 3.1 to 3.3, Qwen, Mistral…via ollama and LM studio). Also learned how to spin up chat interfaces for those locally hosted models (my choice for desktop client: Msty, my choice for web based interface: Open Web UI, that is what DeepSeek chose for their web version as well, LibreChat is a close second although it’s a bit too complicated for the average person to setup)
• Voice synthesis and text-to-speech with both local (OpenAI Whisper model) and cloud version (where ElevenLabs models remain the reigning champion)
• AI-assisted coding (Cursor, Windsurf, Aide.dev, Cline, CoPilot etc.)

So here’s my prediction for 2025:

• AI will continue to replace people, even people who know how to use AI, and will continue to do so until it reaches nominal level, that is when it reaches the minimal amount of fleshy people required to maintain the AI systems
• More layoffs, especially in the software outsourcing industries. It probably won’t die any time soon, but it might eventually will cease to exist at some point. One thing for sure, we will never see massive software development team in outsourcing software development companies anymore. Team sizes will be much leaner and more efficient.
• There will be a massive explosion of entrepreneurship. With everybody having a lot of time on their hands (due to unemployment) but with everything they need to build a product at their fingertips, everybody and their dogs will be launching their products soon.
• The software outsourcing industry will dwindle. With how AI is fast tracking the work process these days, less and less businesses are likely to outsource the development process to a 3rd party. Time to market will but cut short, the market will soon be flooded with subpar SaaS products but will eventually stabilize.