I have a video rental store.

During the 90s and 2000s, owning a video rental store was like owning a gold mine.

It was a perfect business: movies arrived before they did on TV, theaters were losing momentum, and the Friday ritual was sacred: movie, blanket, and popcorn.

Blockbuster took that model to the extreme: franchises everywhere, Häagen-Dazs ice cream, video games, endless shelves. It looked unstoppable.

Blockbuster grew to 94 stores in Spain until 2006.
I personally rented a DVD player in a remote village during a vacation with friends.
I remember the excitement of choosing the movies.
It was a different life.

But one day everything changed.
ADSL arrived, along with Napster, Torrents, and runaway piracy.
And, like a wave impossible to contain, the whole model collapsed.

Some saw it in time and sold.
Others clung to phrases that today sound tragically familiar:

“People will always want physical media”,
“This is just a passing fad”.

In March 2006, Blockbuster announced the closure of all its stores in Spain, which meant the layoff of 688 workers. The model was dead.
From more than 7,000 video rental stores in 2005, today only a few remain and the ones that do… have evolved.
Like Video Instan in Barcelona, the oldest in the country: an oasis with 47,000 titles that streaming never digitized, now turned into a café and, above all, an act of resistance.

I’m a web developer.
And many times I’ve felt like those video store owners.
For years, coding felt like holding the key to the future: guaranteed demand, high rates, and professional respect.
It seemed like nothing could go wrong.

But now, the tsunami has another name: artificial intelligence.
It’s no longer a distant promise or a LinkedIn trend.
It’s already here.
And it didn’t come to help you: it came to rewrite the rules.

As I write this, Amazon has agreed to a collective redundancy plan in its Barcelona offices that will result in 791 departures. Unions link it to the rollout of technology and offshoring. This isn’t a metaphor: the pattern has already started inside the big tech companies themselves.

Meta has restructured its AI team and laid off 600 people.
Salesforce, meanwhile, has started replacing human support with automated agents.

Today, AI generates working code, designs interfaces, documents processes, builds website layouts, optimizes databases, and ships full MVPs in days.
What used to take you a week can now be done in an afternoon.

And yet, what I hear most lately is this:

“AI doesn’t understand the business”,
“There will always need to be a person behind it”,
“This will pass, like every bubble”.

Sound familiar?
It does to me too.
It’s exactly what the video stores used to say.

The difference is that this time it’s not just one industry.
AI is reshaping every knowledge profession: development, design, marketing, analysis, content, support, leadership…

And the most technical won’t survive.
The ones who survive will be those who understand the new map best.

It’s not about competing against AI.
It’s about amplifying yourself with it.

Are you going to wait for the Blockbuster shutdown?
Or are you going to act today?

Tell me straight:

Denial or action?
What are you already doing?