You don't have to think of this as replacement, but as a multiplier. If AI can make 1000 engineers 1.25x more productive - with good auto-complete, boilerplate

You don't have to think of this as replacement, but as a multiplier. If AI can make 1000 engineers 1.25x more productive - with good auto-complete, boilerplate gen, auto-generated docs, faq bots, then you can do what you already did with 800 engineers. Although looked at another way, it will give you more for the same money, so maybe it will make some projects more worth to work on than they were previously so you'd rather hire even more people, because more projects would cross the threshold of "being worth for the investment". So there's multiple forces acting on this, it's unclear how exactly it would play out. In addition just standards and competition for existing things may rise, and the productivity gains will just go there, because you have to build 1.25x better products to compete.