That is one possible interpretation, though I don't think it's supported by any facts.
A competing explanation: companies are spending a ton of money on AI in search of efficiency, and then laying people off in order to offset these investments. That's certainly what's been happening at Microsoft, Oracle, Meta, etc.
Their thinking is more: instead of funding another internal product team, they can redirect that payroll spend into more AI compute and models they hope to monetize.
I don't believe CloudFlare is doing that, though they might, they could be needing to spend in Edge AI compute and what not, building out that infra isn't free, so they might need to find places the cash will come from.
In the organization I work, things are crazy at the moment, we are drinking tokens as if we are in hot desert and 1k is barely enough for a week for some people
It's likely more:
A company finds itself with surplus labor capacity due to the over hiring during Covid, cutting down on risky ventures, protecting margins, and narrowing scope.
But I think there's also:
A company wants to see if AI is making them more efficient, decides to cut people as if it was and see what happens.
I also am not sure about the short term stock price, many recent mass layoffs the stock often moved down. The CloudFlare stock is tanking in after market for example.
The only reason to fire them would be that I think the money will still end up in my pocket without them.
Personally I don't think there was any revenue growth to begin with. They are spending a lot on AI and haven't seen any ROI but for reasons they prefer to fire people and keep investing on AI.
AI-produced code is good but it's not so good that it can replace hand-crafted (or heavily supervised) code written by the type of engineer who works at Cloudflare.
What's really happening is that a few employees realized they can game the system by turning on a firehose of AI slop and pushing 10x the LOC than any other engineer (with or without AI), because there's no one to tell them to stop, and in fact with a management that actively encourages this.
Did they figure out how to game the system? Or was the system set up exactly with incitaments to produce exactly this outcome?
Why do you think it's greed? The company's stock is down and they just missed expectations on their last earnings report (unheard of in big tech in the last 2 years).
It seems more like a traditional layoff scenario