Marc Andreessen just coined a term that perfectly describes what's actually happening to programmers right now and it's the opposite of what the doomers predicted (Save this). He calls them AI vampires. Andreessen's says that programmers using Codex, Claude Code and AI coding tools are not being replaced but they're working harder than ever, sleeping less than ever, with massive bags under their eyes and they are completely euphoric. What's remarkable is that the phenomenon extends far beyond professional engineers. Andreessen described an a16z partner who had never written a single line of code in his career, who built an entire AI powered work system for himself and when asked if he'd ever looked at the underlying code, the answer was simply "hell no." The data behind the anecdote is extraordinary. Andreessen says the leading-edge programmers at a16z portfolio companies are now 20x more productive than they were a year ago, the most dramatic increase in programmer productivity in the history of the industry. The METR May 2026 AI usage survey found technical workers self reporting a 1.4–2x change in work value from AI tools, with 75% of software engineers using AI for at least half their work. The software engineer hiring rate is actually increasing up to 22.77% of new hires in 2025 from 19.32% in late 2023 and companies are now bidding more aggressively for senior engineers specifically because AI empowered engineers have a higher ROI than ever before. The US economy added 115,000 jobs in April 2026 alone, beating the 62,000 consensus forecast precisely as AI adoption hit its highest level on record. This is exactly what basic economics predicts and what almost no one who writes about AI and jobs bothers to say. Classic marginal productivity theory says: when you increase the productivity of a worker, you don't diminish human work, you expand it. The worker becomes more productive, gets paid more, does more, and more jobs are created in the process. Andreessen's ATM analogy holds here because ATMs were supposed to eliminate bank tellers but instead, teller employment rose because lower operating costs let banks open more branches. The no-code AI market has exploded from $4.3 billion in 2023 to $21.2 billion in 2026 not because programmers are being replaced, but because the universe of people who can now build software has expanded by orders of magnitude. The blind spot, as Andreessen notes, is that productivity is now outrunning comprehension. The a16z partner building AI systems he's never looked at the code for represents something genuinely new, software being summoned faster than it can be understood. That's not necessarily dangerous but it does mean the verification, security, and governance layer of the AI development stack is more important now than it has ever been.