Tell that to the company that I was just at that cut Intelij licenses as cost cutting measures.

If they really want to cut cost, fire the worst dev on the team and use that money to give everyone a Codex subscription.

Or better yet, fire the managers or bean counters that think decreasing everyone’s productivity is good for long term savings.

I’m reminded of https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/08/09/the-joel-test-12-s...

Fire the middle management, HR, and etc that have been enthusiastically using AI to do their jobs for the past two or three years already. 90% of them can be replaced by an agent with access to an email account.

Tbh, if companies want to use AI to lay off and cut costs, that's exactly where they should be doing it, not engineering.

How much bloat and bureaucracy bottleneck is sitting in middle management whose favorite past time is wasting everyone's time on meetings that could have been an email? HR? Not the execs, but the HR drones that do nothing but answer employee questions about policy, could have already been replaced with not even an AI, just an old school chatbot, a long time ago.

Instead of cutting engineers, cut the non-tech jobs, flatten the structure.

Oh they laid people off so they could outsource more to India. Despite the managers reminding them, the cost is 1/3 the cost but 3x slower. American devs were 5x more productive overall.