The companies cutting headcount because of AI often just aren’t creative enough to expand their portfolio. There, I said it.

Today, even someone with minimal context can ship end-to-end prototypes. That means existing employees, the people with actual domain knowledge should be able to innovate faster than ever. Anthropic has shipped one of the best coding agents on the market and still has hundreds of engineering roles open.

High-agency people with company context and ideas within each company should be getting amplified right now, not laid off. Instead they're stuck figuring out how to "tokenmaxx" because leadership mandated it and they are forced to ship software no one will use in order to keep their jobs.

This right here. Big companies laying off engineers are basically saying our backlogs are empty and we're out of ideas. This should represent opportunity for small/mid companies to finally compete with the large competitors as some of the advantages of scale are normalized.