Since I had Coinbase up for review already, I decided to peek there first for any sort of correlation. In 2023, their "Technology and Development" line item shows $1.32bn going out, and by 2025 it'd ballooned to $1.67bn. This is despite headcount actually contracting by almost a thousand people between those two statements, which would normally mean a smaller technology spend since a lot of corporate software is seat-based nowadays. This suggests that yeah, actually AI spend is creating a heavier drag on the balance sheets and it's being offset with layoffs since the "job replacement" narrative is strong. That said, I'd need to check dozens' more balance sheets to draw any sort of industry-wide conclusion.

So the CFO makes a model that allows for this and for sufficient ROI they need less people to be more productive. This mechanically forces them to lay people off.

Of course laying people off might actually not improve productivity, but they need this to have chance.

The slow part has always been figuring out exactly what the customer/business actually needs, not the coding. Now teams are throwing money at tokens without solving the "who's buying this?" part appropriately and end up just building excess.

All judgement seems to have gone out the window.

Suits have an idea of what the New Model Coder should be, and it's not people who don't burn through 100,000,000 tokens a week.

I'm eagerly waiting for the prices to come down so I can upgrade my PC to AM5 and run Gemma 4.