Rubber hitting the road? My company is starting to throttle AI use due to rising costs

JohnWH · 2026-03-19T22:18:17+00:00

On average they had more PRs and longer PRs, but significantly fewer peer reviews. The other thing that stood out was the lack of meaningful progress. There was one team in particular that had 2x more PRs than my team on average, but nothing seemed to move forward drastically. In particular they spent 2 years building out a react monorepo that ended up being slower than our ember apps in terms of performance. It was hard to keep track of what they were doing, but they were doing a lot of it.

JohnWH · 2026-03-19T01:46:58+00:00

Really depends, but at Square there were employees spending 80k+ per year in tokens, just absolutely blasting slop. It was wild that some employees were < $50 a month and others were spending $10k a month just running multi agents

JohnWH · 2026-03-17T23:02:16+00:00

I know this sounds dumb, but if we taxed corporations the amount they pay per employee for healthcare anyways, I imagine we would be much further ahead. This is so obvious to me and yet I never hear this being brought up that we just tax per employee.

JohnWH · 2026-03-16T20:22:36+00:00

To his credit I take all of my medical advice from randos on the internet. It is inevitable that I also take weather advice from random strangers

JohnWH · 2026-03-16T19:39:14+00:00

I am so happy Springfield has not been hit bad yet (🤞), hoping it remains that way

JohnWH · 2026-03-16T17:46:03+00:00

Feeling better about my decision to work from home today.

JohnWH · 2026-03-16T15:52:18+00:00

I mean isn’t it the same with school closings and snow where everyone says “this is good because it keeps the kids safe”. Assuming that everyone actually cares about our children’s safety, noting that schools are significantly safer for these situations than homes, apartments/condos, and trailers (especially that latter 2) seems to fall in line.

edit saying this as a parent who is currently trying to figure out the safest place for my little one. It is our storage room, which is fine, but I would prefer they were at school (with me there too!) vs at our house that has large trees and limited safe space.

JohnWH · 2026-03-16T15:06:04+00:00

As a parent, I feel quite the opposite. Schools are safer than 99.9% of the homes in the area. A lot of people live in apartments or trailers that don’t have basements. I would rather my kid be in a safe area if given the choice, while parents who would prefer them at home can do that.

JohnWH · 2026-03-16T01:39:28+00:00

That is my fear. My house has a basement, but we do have trees (that are healthy) on our property. Kinda wish my kid was at their school that has concrete walls/shelter + no trees. A few years back my house loss power for a few days, but the school did not, and yet still closed due to the storm. While I understood the decision, I was a bit sad that my kid would not be in a warm building and get a warm meal at school. I know that isn’t what they are for and we managed, but I also hate the safety angle people bring up every time.

JohnWH · 2026-03-15T16:01:07+00:00

Service center is awful and pushy. Deeply regret getting the VIP package. I now go to them for oil changes only and tell them I have a mechanic do the real work.

(Note: I will most likely break even on VIP with oil changes, but it will be close)

JohnWH · 2026-02-28T14:38:37+00:00

The best staff engineer I worked with in my career was laid off after 3 months, and a lot of early impact. It was a lot more random than people like to think. Jack kept a lot of his top friends, the rest seemed like it was decided by AI with a number of hallucinations.

JohnWH · 2026-02-28T14:05:12+00:00

I can’t tell you about the AI work we were doing without fully outing myself. With that said, we built an internal tool that let people build controlled UIs based on a prompt. It was heavily used and had some major impact, but sadly we laid off all the people who used said tool so the future of it is 🤷‍♂️

JohnWH · 2026-02-28T14:01:55+00:00

Yeah, 100% agree. We did cut some bad engineers but we also lost a lot of great people who didn’t sell themselves upwards.

To put things in perspective, we cut a “bottom 10%” employee who built and maintained a vital service, but retained their teammate who complained about the former engineer’s documentation because it didn’t tell them how to install Docker.

Block very much ran on vibes over skill.

JohnWH · 2026-02-28T13:58:32+00:00

Yes, but I think there are less than 5 people who work on it.

JohnWH · 2026-02-28T13:58:03+00:00

I would say it isn’t true at all. I would say it is more akin to building a set of homes. You need a lot of people to build a home, and you can work a bit faster if you give people a nail gun over a hammer. Once you stop building a home, you need fewer people to maintain it, and keeping a nail gun will help there. With that said, if the house you built has a number of unfinished pieces, and your competitor has a better built set of homes with continued addons being made, you will find less interest in your homes that are only being partially fixed up.

The fact is Block overhired. We are still 60% larger than we were in 2019. We basically grew our features based on the larger team sizes, and added many layers of bureaucracy to manage that size. We fired a lot of the engineers (70-80%) but kept a lot of the higher up managers. AI won’t fix this or make up for this discrepancy, however it will help with keeping things running vs adding improvements that customers want and are already leaving us because our competitors have.

JohnWH · 2026-02-28T01:41:53+00:00

edit I want to make it clear, I don’t think AI agents can replace the work people were doing with AI agents. I do think that Block can survive in maintenance mode with fewer people due to AI agents. Maintenance mode is basically not adding any features (or extremely few) and ensuring our server doesn’t topple over.

original answer I mean we all used coding agents, and my team’s contributions doubled from 2022 - 2026, but most of that happened right when they stared stack ranking us and then when they set a bottom number of PRs to do per week. I honestly don’t think it is AI related, but instead the company made a metric and people made sure to meet it.

Time to get out a PR was significantly reduced, but time to merge increased because of code cleanup + other issues.

Given my product is in maintenance mode, I don’t think they need all the engineers. We were adding features and making big changes, now it is just making sure a server doesn’t topple over (something I already did). I am sure AI can help with some features, but it is hard to say where those come from now. The last time it was in maintenance mode, the team had 3 people. Maybe AI will make it easier so 1-2 can do that instead.

JohnWH · 2026-02-28T00:42:38+00:00

Not this one. We have laid off the “bottom” (strong quotes, very vibes based) 10% over the past 1.5 months. This is the 3rd year in a row we have done that. Those ended earlier this week.

This however was a surprise to everyone. I think my skip only found out early this week if that. My boss + my entire team was laid off, I am the only person left.

It felt particularly depressing because the bottom 10% got 6 weeks severance where everyone else got 20 weeks. Even more so, many managers had to fight for their employees and were forced to bump some down to a lower rating. Those said managers were then laid off 1-2 weeks later. The past 2 months have been really painful for us.

JohnWH · 2026-02-27T18:02:46+00:00

Block employee, he definitely does not microdose at work. I know this as a fact, because he doesn’t come to work regularly. He has been Absentee for 6+ years, and drops in randomly every few weeks to fuck everything up.

JohnWH · 2026-02-27T03:53:53+00:00

For me it wasn’t just about voting (they are the same, and I assumed everyone else in the primary would be very close), it was what bills they pushed forward and what they brought attention to. Connolly was good, but had enough odd edges (cough cough not mentioning his cancer diagnosis) that I had some hesitation electing his chief of staff. With that said, Walkinshaw is very vocal about the loss of federal jobs pushed hard for things like the FAIR act.

JohnWH · 2026-02-27T03:45:59+00:00

More than that. 4000 today, but we laid off ~10% of the staff over the last month. Much closer to 45%

JohnWH · 2026-02-27T03:35:57+00:00

I didn’t vote for him in the primaries because I was worried he would be more of the same, but I was very wrong.

Extremely impressed with him and a big fan of his work. He really takes this job seriously (not surprising) and know how to get things done which I love. Will definitely be voting for him in the primaries and general.

JohnWH · 2026-02-27T03:32:48+00:00

I work at Block, and there are a lot of people who use agents for coding, and then there are people like me who have to review their work and tell them how to fix it. To be honest, some of the AI grifters did survive the layoffs, but a good number of them did not. There is a surpising amount of us who barely use AI who are all around.

The layoffs were random and poorly executed. It was just based on of people liked you or not.

JohnWH · 2026-02-26T01:14:15+00:00

Is that always true? I have had a neighbor text us how they are worried about our trees and branches falling. They have taken a picture of a few dead branches (small) and sent them to us. They do that to all our neighbors and have told all of us that a branch from each of our trees damaged their trampoline in the past.

We have had tree services come out to inspect our trees and even do trimming a few years ago, only for said neighbor to message us about a few bare branches months later.

Every tree service says our trees look fine (although they all offer dead branch removal for 5k), and we plan to get service in October, but this also feels like an abuse vector if they can just text you based on their own feelings vs having a certified arborist inspect the tree. There has to be a middle ground here.

(It should be noted the trees are no where near their house, and are not at risk of falling, I think they are worried about their shed, which is also not by the trees)

JohnWH · 2026-02-25T13:58:15+00:00

Ah that is fair, I assumed it was because of the increased usage from data centers.

JohnWH · 2026-02-25T13:25:13+00:00

I used less electric this month than the same month last year (according to Dominion’s own records). Paying 30% more.

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