For every $1 companies cut from freelancers, they spent $0.03 on AI, according to #Ramp's data across thousands of firms.
Over half the businesses using #freelance marketplaces in 2022 stopped entirely by 2025. Labor spend dropped from 0.66% to 0.14% of total spend.
But look at what got cut. "Build me a landing page." "Write a CRUD API." "Fix this CSS." It's the commodity output.
The #freelance work that's growing is the opposite end.
The work that remains? Designing a serverless backend that holds up under real load. Shipping production AI within sub-second latency budgets. Running AI agents with proper per-tenant isolation on #AWS.
#Coding is one piece of it. Architecture, failure modes, what happens at 3 AM when the provider rate-limits you. That's the rest. AI made the first part faster. It didn't touch the second.
If you're still selling hours of code output, what's your plan?