> AI tools make great team members even better
This is the predominant (public) talking point. And it’s true.
But along with that: when you have effective people becoming even more effective with AI, it becomes glaringly obvious who the INeffective people are. At which point it becomes hard to justify keeping those people around.
(That often includes people who are otherwise effective but aren’t utilizing agents and are therefore losing their edge.)
Before AI, it was impossible to measure productivity. Some tried with misguided metrics like lines of code added but that just incentivized writing obtuse code.
What has changed?
vibes maybe?
If effective AI enhanced SWEs can ship features in a week, the guys who ship 1 feature a quarter stand out more?
Impossible to measure in absolute terms but I think it's clear productivity increases relatively when LLMs are used. At least that's my strong experience.
Losing what edge?
It's weird to fire people instead of giving them training.
I know you're arguing a more general point, but it's worth pointing out in their layoff announcement, CloudFlare is claiming:
- This is NOT performance related.
- This is NOT a cost cutting exercise.
They say both things explicitly. What they don't say very clearly is what the layoffs ARE about.