Shrimpton Agency

It's 2 a.m. somewhere, a stranger with a five-star profile and a stock-photo avatar just picked up your "can you move the logo 4px left" ticket, they'll fix it in five minutes, bill you $200, mark it done, and move straight on to the next brand's ticket without ever learning what you sell, who buys it or why the logo was there in the first place.

Repeat that a few hundred times and you've got a Shopify store.

Not a business partner. A store.

Random people, random places, random tickets

Let's be honest about what a big slice of the remote dev market became. US and UK brands got treated as a picking ground, an all-you-can-eat buffet of little jobs at rates nobody could earn at home, pulled off a marketplace by random people in random places with zero commitment to the job or the business behind it.

The goal was never your store. The goal was the next ticket.

No ownership. No documentation. No career. Just volume.

We saw this coming back in 2024, when we raised a toast to the digital nomad, who would "dance gracefully on the thin line between freedom and irresponsibility, juggling deadlines and treating time zones as mere suggestions." The ticket-pickers took that act global. And when a job goes sideways, good luck. As we wrote in The Hidden Dangers and Costs of Hiring Remote Developers in 2023, "Your ability to take legal action over an individual in another territory is close to zero."

And AI just ate the volume. Within eight months of ChatGPT's launch, job posts for software, app and web development fell 20.62% on freelance platforms. Fiverr went "AI-first" and laid off 30% of its own staff, with its CEO warning, "AI is coming for your jobs." Shopify now generates theme blocks from a plain-English prompt right inside the theme editor, which is exactly the "add a section to my homepage" ticket that kept the whole buffet running.

That $200 five-minute fix? It's now a sentence you type yourself.

Don't take my word for it

People post total fiction on LinkedIn, so here are our own receipts. Unsolicited “hire our developers” pitches in our inbox are up 223% on 2023, and 2026 isn't even over. Those are floors, not ceilings: spam isn't counted, and a lot of it lands there.

The buffet is getting desperate.

And where are they coming from? Four in ten are from India. The rest are a world tour.

The big end of the same model is hurting too

The giants run a grown-up version of the same playbook: sell people by the hour, scale by hiring another 40,000 graduates. AI broke that math as well.

TCS, India's biggest IT services firm, announced the largest layoff in its history, about 12,000 jobs, in July 2025. The top five Indian IT firms shrank their combined workforce by 7,389 in the year to March 2026, and TCS cut its graduate intake plans to 25,000, down from 40,000-plus. Infosys narrowed its growth guidance to 1.5–3%, with its CEO noting "there is a productivity benefit that will continue to come through."

Then Anthropic launched Claude Cowork in February 2026, and investors decided the routine coding these firms bill by the hour was now a prompt. India's Nifty IT index fell 19.5% that month, its worst month since 2008, and finished the half down 31%, its worst first half since 2003. In the Philippines, the industry body IBPAP cut its 2028 jobs target from 2.5m to as low as 1.85m. In Vietnam, analysts covering FPT warn of "downward pressure on pricing for new contracts as AI reduces labor requirements."

Good riddance

I'm going to say the quiet part out loud: this is a good thing.

For too long, irresponsible developers with no commitment to the job or the business have been rewarded for doing exactly one thing, grabbing more tickets. We called it back in 2023: "missed deadlines, incomplete tasks, and a general lack of commitment and accountability." They never built real businesses. They never built real careers. They built a queue, and brands paid for it with janky themes, mystery apps and a checkout nobody dares touch.

That model was always a race to the bottom. AI just showed up with a faster car.

"Tickets aren't a career."

And here's the bit that matters: this isn't about where anyone lives. Good engineers anywhere will thrive, in Bangalore, Manila, Ho Chi Minh City, London or L.A., because judgment, taste and giving a damn about the business don't come out of a prompt. India's tech sector still grew 6.1% to about $315bn last year, and TCS now reports more than $3.1bn in annualized AI revenue. The serious players are adapting.

What's dying is the ticket-picking. AI is weeding out the good from the bad, and it's about time.

Washington isn't the story (yet)

You'll hear that US policy is finishing the job. Calm down. The $100,000 H-1B fee knocked Indian IT stocks nearly 3% when it landed, but a federal court blocked enforcement on Sept. 30, 2026. The HIRE Act's proposed 25% tax on outsourcing payments is stalled and is not law. And the 50% tariffs on India apply to goods, not IT services.

Signals, not settled law. The real pressure is the prompt box.

So what about your store?

If your site was assembled one random ticket at a time, here's the bill coming due. Picture a theme held together by seventeen app snippets, three copy-pasted jQuery libraries and a checkout customization nobody can explain, a whole fucking patchwork quilt of five-minute fixes from people who never met each other, and the last one stopped replying in March.

That's not hypothetical for some brands. One Australian Shopify partner describes inheriting Napoleon Perdis's Shopify Plus store from "a previous offshore agency" with "restricted back-office access, and a marketing team unable to launch campaigns without external intervention." Another rescued a Juice Plus+ platform where subscription failures happened with "no logging, no alerts, no monitoring." (And for the record, cheap local ticket-pickers wreck stores just as well. Geography was never the point.)

So, before your ticket-picker moves on to the next buffet:

• Own the store, the domain, the repo and the admin. Not "your guy."
• Get it documented. If nobody can explain it, nobody can fix it.
• Count the apps. Then delete half of them.
• Stop buying tickets. Hire people who care whether you sell more. As our services page puts it, "Web development isn't an outsourced product, it is the product."
• And whatever you do, don't break Shopify.

AI didn't kill the developer. It killed the ticket. What's left worth paying for is judgment, taste and someone who's still there next quarter.

If your store was built one ticket at a time and it's starting to show, sarah@shrimpton.agency is a good place to start.