Comment by cyanydeez
13 hours ago
The skeptical assumption is they need to pay for the AI bills, not that the AI use is actually providing the promises CEOs are making.
13 hours ago
The skeptical assumption is they need to pay for the AI bills, not that the AI use is actually providing the promises CEOs are making.
The reasonable assumption is they believe a recession is coming.
*a recession did infact come*
Why is this text not rendered as expected.
2 replies →
I've been told that a recession is coming since 2009, when I started investing - there has never been one since then despite all the dire predictions - therefore, my investments are safe
6 replies →
Honestly not a bad theory. There’s definitely a huge disparity between actual productivity gained by using agentic coding done somewhat properly… and a non-stop wave of vibe coded work causing outages and churn. Pre-Covid hiring coupled with the high enterprise pricing for AI plans, it would make sense.
If you listen to people on HN you could think AI is not increasing productivity or is even having a net negative effect.
I think the reality is different.
In this thread I saw the resume of an engineer affected by this Cloudflare layoff. In the resume he claimed that adopting opencode in his workflow, he shipped an integration in half the time it took peers without AI assistance for similar projects.
I’m sitting in an airport after spending a week with a client. They’ve killed off one of their enterprise saas subscriptions with an internal ai assisted effort and are looking to kill more. Granted, they are extremely competent but software isn’t their business. There may be something to the saaspocolypse.
I've seen non-tech people building internal tooling that engineering just never had time to get to. Small/lean companies are leveling up with AI, and they aren't carrying the salary overhead of the big companies. The big companies are going to have to get that much more productive in order to compete and/or they are going to have to cut staff.
Shipping is just a milestone. We all know that "AI" can produce code much faster than any human.
Productivity should be measured over time and take into account the cost of maintenance, reliability, amount of issues, etc.
infrastructure changes slowly. once its built its not clear what you are paying 1111 people for.
It is May 2026, there is no difference between AI and non-AI bills.
Most (if not all) major enterprises in the US have gone through at least one round of org-wide subscription renewals (eg: Atlassian product packs, Microsoft product packs, etc) where 1) price increases were mandatory, 2) AI features could not be opted out of, and 3) AI feature usage was strongly encouraged from C-suite to client-facing biz staff to telephone agent support staff.
I repeat, we are passed the point where AI bills and non-AI bills can be differentiated. We are all paying for these features driven by tokens whether we like it or not, whether the cost-benefit analysis makes sense, and whether they are even being used.
And we are all passing the costs onto everyone lower on the totem pole, from insurance groups to bank groups to national grocery chains to consultant conglomerates to minimum wage front-line staff to below-minimum-wage gig workers.
And this is why there are layoffs, every price increase from the top down causes further price increases to cascade down.