I also hear from people I know at Meta that there is a very strong push to use AI to speed up developer work. One person I know complains that their velocity is slowed down because they have to fix some of the slop that gets checked in as code review is too lax about AI generated code.

My guess is that if the planned layoffs remove these "underperforming" devs that are actually fixing AI introduced bugs at the detriment of their own velocity, that will hopefully lead to a correction that AI isn't actually dramatically increasing efficiency, but rather that it trades efficiency amongst individuals with likely a slight positive trend in efficiency overall.

Interestingly, since I'm also from an academic background, it seems professors have leaned in heavily on AI and are essentially using their PhD students as filters for AI ideas (which have a MUCH lower signal to noise in that domain).

Interesting times (speaking as an NLP researcher).

Definitely happens. Many meetings about what to do with the avalanche of vibe diffs from PMs that take organic SWE eyeball time to review hah