DevFest Cairo 2026 · Speaker Proposal

AI Didn't Take My
Freelance Job

It took the part of it I used to sell.

AI & Machine Learning 30 min Intermediate
Mohamed Bn Ramadan
QR code to bnramadan.comPortfolio QR code to LinkedInLinkedIn
Mohamed Bn Ramadan
CTO ×2 · Founder ×2
Minute 0
01

Who here has ever freelanced?

02

Who's going into a company instead?

03

Keep your hand up if you shipped something this month you couldn't debug yourself.

Most hands stay up. Same talk either way.

The long way round

I didn't get the degree I wanted.
I got the practice instead.

Already working. Sites, then ledgers.
شاومينج. Commerce, not Engineering.
Coding as a hobby. Videos, rebuilt by hand.
Scrapers and WhatsApp scripts.
Designer, video editor, media buyer, content. Where the creativity came from.
Marketing manager. Building the stores myself.
20 products. CTO ×2, Founder ×2.

Take the internship if you're starting. Six months in a real company beats a year of tutorials.

Three years under someone else's name
Mido Ramadan → Bn Ramadan

Same engineer. Same work.
Different opening price.

I learned what I was really paid for on my own name, years before I learned it on my rate.

The argument

AI didn't replace freelancers.
It replaced everyone who was only selling execution.

Live · the room votes

Ship it, or hold it?

// "Only an admin can delete a project"
export async function DELETE(req, { params }) {
  const token = await getToken({ req });

  if (!token || token.role !== 'admin') {
    return new Response('Forbidden', { status: 403 });
  }

  await Project.findByIdAndDelete(params.id);
}

It compiles. It reads beautifully.
Hands up.

The role was signed at login.

Revoke that admin and the token still works until it expires. And the id reaches the query uncoerced.

The model didn't fail you.
You had no way to tell.

Everyone uses AI now. Anyone who says they don't is lying.

So the question isn't whether. It's who's driving.

An old Fiat 128 saloon
AI drives
A modern BMW M4
You drive

You prompt, it ships, and you can't explain your own code. The first real error ends you, and nobody stays convinced by you for long.

You decide what gets built. It writes, you judge, you fix. Your taste is the product, and it travels to anything you point it at.

Same tool. The difference is whether your brain is switched on.

Start tonight

Practice has a shape.

01One or two videosAn hour, not a course. Learn what the pieces are called, then stop watching.
02Four or five projectsYour own hands, using AI throughout. It writes. You decide, and you fix.
03The real outputNot the projects. That you can now see what the model got wrong.

I build with an agent I wrote myself. I still type the code, because I like the sound of the keyboard. The tool is fast. The direction is mine.

The part nobody screens for

Can you lose 15 hours to one error and feel like it was five minutes?

Then this is your field.

Everyone else is chasing the trend and the money. You have to love it to be creative in it, and the money arrives behind the creativity, never in front of it.

The ask

Let's begin.

Thirty minutes on the AI & ML track, and one live moment where the room finds out whether it can still read its own code.

Mohamed Bn Ramadan · Creative Software Engineer · bnramadan.com

QR code to bnramadan.comPortfolio QR code to LinkedInLinkedIn
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